Why don’t you admit it?

They want our way of life
Well, they can take mine any time they like.

I’ve waited 11 years to see Jarvis Cocker. I know, I know, you liked Pulp in 1985, you’ve seen them 17 times in their native Sheffield, you still have your blow-up Jarvis from Select magazine and you once saw him buying a cookbook in Waterstones. But I haven’t, so please indulge my smug satisfaction at having relished the presence of one last teen idol.

Love is subjective so I shan’t be turning music critic any time soon, but let me just say that Jarvis still has it in abundance, working your heart with humour and darkness and recognition, and his band are great too. Most of the crowd were well rehearsed in songs that came out only a few days ago, and even if they weren’t full of the wide-eyed euphoria that I absorbed on Monday (David says that this is how cults get their groupies) they were mostly delightful, throwing their own balloons (’Cyril’s 80th Birthday’) and bopping gently along.

The lyrics are outstanding, the tunes are engaging, the fringe and hips and elbows are jutting away as ever and Candida is waiting in the wings with her arms folded and a little smile on her lips. I am realising that I don’t know the words to the third verse of ‘Space Oddity’ and then I think Jarvis looks straight at me and I blush. Proper, proper heroes never let you down.

Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it’s anthropologically unjust,
Oh but the takings are up by a third.

C***s are still running the world.