But I really can’t remember feeling quite so buzzily on edge, so shiveringly alive since… well, since the last time I saw The Rolling Stones, at Southampton football stadium (sorry, Pompey fans) back in 2018. Or the time before that, Hyde Park, 2013. And yet here we go again, counting the hours again, hardly daring to believe it. Mick is apparently over his Covid (they played Milan the other night); we’ve found a way to get to London on train strike day that doesn’t involve a train; and so, touch wood, touch everything, we are all systems go. Barring acts of Keef, we will be there – Hyde Park, Saturday, June 25 to see The Rolling Stones on their 60th anniversary tour. Appropriately it’s my brother Jonathan’s 60th birthday this summer which takes care of his birthday present very nicely. But what really boggles my mind is the – to me at least – astonishing fact that we will be seeing them exactly 40 years to the day since we saw for the first time. On June 25 1982, I finished my A levels that morning and trained, tubed and legged it to Wembley stadium; meanwhile Jonathan whizzed across from the London Hospital where he was a second-year at medical school. And now, precisely four decades later to the very day, on June 25 2022, we will reconvene as two middle-aged blokes far, far, far more excited than can possibly be good for our health. The fact is that, as for millions and millions of us around the world, the Stones, those seemingly indestructible gods of rock, have been one of the great continuities of our adult lives. There’s a delicious irony to the fact that their first UK number one 58 years ago was a song called It's All Over Now. The point is that it has never been All Over Now despite all the tiffs and the tragedies which have dogged them down the years. But there’s no denying that The Last Time is getting ever closer. Each time you see them, you realise just how incredibly precious the now is. Like everything in life, really… This is the first time we will have seen them since the death last summer of drummer Charlie Watts; and aside from the great sadness of his not being there, of course they are going to sound different. Charlie was one of the greatest drummers of all time, but also one the most distinctive drummers in the business. It’s going to be so heart-breakingly not the same – while feeling so wonderfully familiar too. The simple fact remains. Life without The Stones is unimaginable. Or my life at least, plus that of countless of millions of others, of course. It’s pretty much impossible to put into words what The Rolling Stones mean to me, but maybe one gruesome moment gets closer than any other to summing up just how much they inhabit my heart and soul and always have done. Weird things go through your mind when you think your number’s up – things that sum you up completely. I was stabbed and kicked in a vicious mugging in South Africa a few years ago. You can read about it in my book Outrunning The Demons (Bloomsbury, 2019). As I lay on a Cape Town pavement, watching the blood pool around me, fighting the urge to shut my eyes, I found myself thinking “So that’s that, then.” And with that thought came the consolation: “At least I am wearing my favourite Rolling Stones T-shirt.” It mattered in that moment – just as the Stones have mattered all my life and mattered hugely. The T-shirt, a present from my daughter Laura, has been my protection ever since. I mean, you’d have to be seriously unlucky to get stabbed twice while wearing exactly the same T-shirt, wouldn’t you? And four years ago, two years after the stabbing, I was thrilled to wear that self-same T-shirt in their presence. Possibly they didn’t notice. And I will be wearing it again on Saturday. It’s the T-shirt that I so nearly died in. It’s the T-shirt that I most want to live in. And my thoughts will be full not just of the stabbing but also that glorious day, Friday, June 25 1982, when I saw the Stones for the first time – one of those days that, even as I lived it, I knew I would remember in glowing, radiant detail for the rest of my life. Barely had I added the final Punkt to my German translation than I was on the train to London, ready to be enveloped by the weirdest, most heart-warming experience. This was 1982, remember. The Stones weren’t the national treasures they are today, our country’s favourite grandfathers. Back then, you were met with scorn and sympathy (For The Devil?) if you dared confess to liking them. But as my brother and I hared it towards Wembley, the crowds grew thicker with every step, Jagger look-alikes and wannabe-Keefs everywhere around us. Ensconced in the stadium, Mick, Keith, Ronnie, Bill and Charlie were like the world’s most powerful magnet drawing their people, Stones people, towards them. A magnet indeed. And it was sheer magnetism we got. Even when he’s a tiny dot on the stage horizon, Jagger is an astonishing performer, electrifying, dazzling, intoxicating, capable of thrilling to the bone 80,000 people while making each and every one of us think that this is for me and me alone. It was over in a flash. A Jumping Jack Flash. Two hours whizzed by. And slowly, reluctantly the crowds started to fade away. Standing roughly where the centre circle on the pitch would be, we pulled at the tarpaulin and grabbed handfuls of Wembley grass. I stuck mine to a piece of cardboard and wrapped it in sellotape, a treasure forever. And that was the point. After adoring them for four or five years by then, I was utterly convinced that I was seeing them for both the first time and the last time. These were men in their late 30s. No band had been going for 20 years by then. I had got there under the wire. Just in time. It was a chance I would never get again. Except that I have. Again and again. Maine Road, Manchester, 1990, stands out, as does Cardiff 2007. So too does Glasgow 2003. So does the phenomenal Hyde Park return in 2013. Eight subsequent concerts. Eight more times, completely blown away. And now number ten looms on Saturday… Of all the arts, it is music – above theatre, above cinema, above everything – that gives us the biggest, the most visceral oomph, and the Stones, mesmerising, lavish, extravagant, brilliant, give us an oomph that absolutely no one else can. The soundtrack to my life, as the old cliché goes. All the marathons I have run map themselves onto Stones songs. 42 marathons. 42 different songs. A soggy slog in Amsterdam is Plundered My Soul; New York is Harlem Shuffle; torrential rain in Dublin is Gimme Shelter; a double figure-of-eight course in La Rochelle is Around and Around; an (unwise) marathon with a fever in Berlin is Paint It Back; a personal best in London is Satisfaction; my very first London is Streets of Love. And so it goes on. Just as The Stones themselves go on. Just as I go on and on about The Stones. You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Mick sings. But don’t forget the next line is “But if you try sometime you find/You get what you need.” Want and need will gloriously merge on Saturday.