Nobel for Bob Dylan brought back memories of a happy, fuzzy time

I am a scatty reader. A flighty reader with the attention span of a pigeon. You ask what I'm reading and I will name six books, all open simultaneously. Ask me how many I finish... I won't tell. So when I read that Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize for Literature, I wasn't thinking... how does he compare with other contenders like Murakami or Adonis who didn't get it; and Marquez, Steinbeck or Svetlana Alexievich who did in previous years. I had no answer and frankly no opinion.

Because my mind had wafted back to a sweaty summer afternoon in the 1980s... pick a year... 1985. I was 12. We had just got a CD player. But most of our music was still on LPs. My mum lifted the needle off the LP player and pulled out the 45 RPM record. It said "Lay, Lady Lay".

The needle hit the track and a thin, raspy, smoked-up sound jangled out of our wooden speakers. "I long to see you, in the morn-ing light...I long to reach for you, in the night..."

My mum's eyes shone, big and wide. This is what romance is, I was thinking. A wild, wonderful man asking me to "lay lady lay, lay across my big brass bed..." I said I loved the lyrics, but didn't much care for the country twang in his voice. My mum agreed. But it didn't matter. Who cared about the way Dylan's voice stretched and warbled, when he was saying the things he did? We lay on the divan in our living room with its block-printed cover and dreamed. I don't know about her, but my mind was on the first boy I had fallen in love with. I was on a big brass bed. Time stood still. Dylan's words morphed into my dream.

• "Why wait any longer for the world to begin
• You can have your cake and eat it too
• Why wait any longer for the one you love
• When he’s standing in front of you"

Those were happy, fuzzy days. We had an entire wall covered with a grainy blow-up of Ho Chi Minh and I wasn't even sure why. It just looked good. "People would come and go" in that drawing room, not necessarily speaking of Michelangelo... to borrow from TS Eliot. Eliot and Dylan... both spoke of shattered worlds. Was "Lay Lady Lay" Dylan's tribute to Eliot?

• "Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
• You have the scene arrange itself - as it will seem to do -
• With 'I have saved this afternoon for you' ;
• And four waxed candles in the darkened room,
• Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
• An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb
• Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid."

(From T S Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations, Portrait Of A Lady, 1917)

The romance of nihilism. Coffee house conversations, barsatis full of smoke. Cheap whiskey in house glasses. Rum punch flavoured with Tobasco. Indira Gandhi, Thatcher, The Vietnam War... dying democracies across the Dylan-scape, all rolled into infernal collective balls...and love. Love for free.

It wasn't such a transactional world, the political world that Dylan described. There didn't have to be much point to things and that was the point. You didn't know if your money would last till next week's grocery bill. You wore nighties to sleep. And lathered the turpentine smelling Cherry Blossom White Liquid polish onto your white canvas school shoes. Chalk rub the dirt off if you're forgotten to polish them. Or your teacher would punish you at assembly, after prayers.

It didn't matter that you said the Catholic "Our father, in heaven, hallowed be thy name" each morning. And then turned the lights down on Friday night and Saturday with your mum and put on a scratchy, raspy wholly un-Catholic record to groove to.

Now, we're in a Trump world. A Modi and Brexit world. Money talks. And the jingle jangle of the Tambourine Man is a foggy memory. And then, there are risings. In Modi's Gujarat, Dalits protest on the street. Muslims gather round against being lynched for carrying cows. I remember the days of LPs with my mum; as my dad lit his hundredth cigarette. Us going out for a steak dinner.

And nursery rhymes I was fed on, age three.

• "Jack Sprat could eat no fat,
• His wife could eat no lean;
• And so between them both,
• They licked the platter clean."

Were they eating beef? In the world I grew up in, this wasn't even a question. Now it's outlawed. You can get arrested for WhatsApping the question. And then, Dylan gets the Nobel. Maybe the Swedes sitting on the committee were thinking... can we bring some of those days back?

Sometimes words are custom-made to shake you up. Turn your insides out. And sometimes, they're meant to turn back the clock. Or maybe mix it all up. We are back in a new age of protest. Maybe long nights of no sleep today are leaky spaces where some of the old fuzzy fearlessness has poured out.

And the Tambourine Man can indeed play a song for me. I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.

• "I’m branded on my feet
• I have no one to meet
• And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming."