YOU know you’re getting old when you go to a gig but pay a small fortune for a seat in the balcony because you’re no longer willing or able to mill about among the crowd in front of the stage.

Dodgy knees, that’s my excuse.

What you miss in excitement and atmosphere you make up for in comfort, which suddenly seems so much more important.

Little things, like accepting that particular limitation when I booked to see the excellent Hozier in Southampton on Saturday, bring home the passage of the years.

Here’s another one. Free park and ride coming to an end just in time to catch Christmas shoppers venturing to Salisbury.

I suppose we can’t complain, really.

It’s 18 months now since the Novichok shock, and as Boris Johnson, with characteristic breeziness, put it on his recent visit to Salisbury Plain, time to “move on”.

I think he’s right, but for the wrong reasons.

Our PM, who never lets a day pass without some electioneering photo-opportunity featuring troops, nurses or factory workers (not forgetting cute schoolchildren, and tough guys in hard hats on building sites) was obviously itching to avoid talking about anything doomy and gloomy like Russian state-sponsored terrorism, according to the Journal reporter who interviewed him.

‘Confident’ is his buzzword.

‘Confident’ is the new ‘strong and stable’.

Listen out for how many times he says it as he summons up billions to splurge, in spite of his predecessors declaring the cupboard bare.

I don’t know about you, but personally, I’m feeling very confident. Confident that I know a magic money tree when I see one.

“We’re all in this together.” That was another mantra, back in the day when Call Me Dave was more than a writer of memoirs.

Precisely what we’ll all be in together if Boris crashes us out of Europe without a deal is probably best left to the imagination. After all, this is a family newspaper.

Climate change

FOLLOWING last week’s column on climate change, I am glad to see that Wiltshire and our city council are getting their respective acts together and staging a public conference on this vital subject.

It will take place at the Guildhall on the evening of November 4.

There’ll be an exhibition, and a short talk from each authority about how the issue affects them, and what they’re doing about it, followed by round-table discussions and a chance for people to put forward their own points.

Public events staged by councils do tend to attract a predictable crowd. ‘The usual suspects’, you might say. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way. They are the ones who bother.

But it would be wonderful if a few more bothered about this one. In particular, the kind of energetic, impassioned young people we encountered at the Extinction Rebellion march.

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