The greatest living music composer, Paul McCartney, has just started another long tour and is playing his near three hour shows across America. He is 84 in June. A gig he played a few days ago was a private show at Apple Park in Cupertino for Apple employees celebrating the popular portable telephone manufacturer’s 50th birthday. It was a stellar show with a stunning setlist – how could it not be given the depth of Macca’s back catalogue? – but it was more something he said during the show that got me to thinking.
McCartney was good friends with the late Apple head honcho Steve Jobs, who was a huge Beatles fan. It was not his throwaway remark “I can’t believe it’s been 50 years since Steve Jobs gave me my first iPhone, but that’s the truth!” that resonated me with me, amusing though it was, but a much deeper comment he made. “I haven’t had the heart to delete his number.” I know exactly what he means.
Like all of you, I have lost plenty of people along the walk of life. 2025, as I have mentioned ad nauseum, I fear, to many of you on my blog and on social media, was a particularly distressing year. Slowly, very slowly, but surely, time is doing its usual trick in healing because that’s what time does. I have all manner of reminders by way of old photos and even letters from family members who died many years ago, stored in tin boxes in the spare room, and should I wish to reminisce, as I occasionally do, that’s where I can go. But technology, particularly in the form of the iPhone which was launched by Steve Jobs’ company Apple in 2007, has changed everything.
We still have an old fashioned address book which we still keep next to where the house phone used to be. It hasn’t been updated since I don’t know when because our telephones do that job these days. But after reading Macca’s lovely comment about Steve Jobs, I took a glance through my phone’s ‘address book’, as well as saved emails and, particularly, messages I have received via the Messenger app and there they are: the addresses of family members and friends who died, as well as exchanges of messages, some happy but some incredibly sad. And like the former Beatles man, I haven’t had the heart to delete them.
You will understand why the messages will remain private. There are, for example, heartbreaking words from friends who were dying and knew it. In some instances, they were suffering terribly, one in particular wishing life was all over. I have kept the messages from friends I was arranging to visit. Other messages were part of exchanges that were to remain unfinished, cut off by death. And my address book remains unchanged. There are no lines across the names of the departed as there might be in an actual address book. The names live on, even if the people don’t.
I am not immune to a little emotion that is generated by seeing the old messages and the names of people who are no longer with us. And I do wonder from time-to-time whether I could have done or said more when people were still in the land of living. Could I, perhaps, have visited more often, made more of an effort to engage either in person or via modern technology? That is a selfish reaction, I know, the danger of turning myself into a minor victim. I don’t feel that way, of course. It’s a minor guilt trip, that’s all. I’d like to think that, in the main, I did my best and was there for people in the best way I could be.
I see the names of those who have left us pretty well every day, not least on social media accounts which still exist for some of the departed, floating in cyberspace, never to be used again. Part of me wishes the accounts be taken down but another part of me likes the reminder, the prompt.
I won’t be deleting numbers or accounts, just like Macca won’t be deleting the name of his friend Steve Jobs from his phone. It’s just the modern day version of the old address book, that’s all, a guidebook of those who still mean so much to me, even if they are no longer with us. And hopefully, one day I shall smile again as I see the names and messages, as I can smile at the photos in my old tin boxes.
Allow me to end this blog with the first verse of a song called Time Passes On by the legendary American popular beat combo outfit Orleans, from their 1975 long player Let There Be Music, written by John and Johanna Hall:
Time Passes OnLike a river that must always runNow you are goneBut I will have you ’til time is doneYou can never take awayThe love you gave me yesterdayAnd I don’t have to capture you‘Cause you’re here in my memory
