Editor’s Note

If you haven’t seen the recent Heineken advert called “The Night is Young”, look it up on YouTube … and while you’re at it, take a look at the “We’ll Meet Again” one, too. It’s fabulous! If I hadn’t been convinced about getting dressed up in my finest clothes to go grocery shopping, I am now. In fact, I hear from our fashion team that there’s a group of people who are dressing up to get vaccinated. I salute them.

In “The Night Is Young”, fogies are raving at a beachside bar — grooving on the dance floor, scrapping for a section of the bathroom mirror and chatting each other up over a drink before bare-footing it across the sand for a moonlit skinny dip. The payoff line, “The night belongs to the vaccinated”, says everything about the liberation of people of a certain age group.

There was a brief period when it looked like the over-60s would be the only ones eligible for a vaccine passport and thus free to take over Ibiza. That’s no longer likely. The Instagram posts shared by my young (vaccinated) cousin who’s currently on the Spanish island, full of young ravers, attests to this. But still, it’s this pre-post-pandemic-midvaccination period we’re going through that’s made being old, fun and funky — with the world as your oyster — a bit of a trend.

So I was interested to read this week that, after a lifetime of hellraising, the Rolling Stones are getting ready (and are fit enough) to go on tour again — at the combined age of 308. They’re calling it the No Filter Tour, no less. In the Telegraph, Guy Kelly wonders what Mick, Keith (both 77 years old), Ronnie, 74, and Charlie, 80, understand about drinking from the unfiltered fountain of youth, that the rest of us don’t. It’s one of the great unsolved mysteries of medicine — and certainly the most puzzling, he admits, before listing the fabulous fours’ near-death escapes, including an assassination attempt on Mick by a Hell’s Angel and, of course, copious amounts of heroin and assorted other chemicals for the greater parts of their lives.

I also saw that Dolly Parton recently recreated her Playboy cover, 43 years later. She did it on Instagram for her husband of 52 years, Carl Dean, and she says he still thinks she’s hot. The secret of their long and happy marriage? Lots of time apart, she insists. A bit difficult these days, sadly.