I’M 70 years old so every now and then, I have a senior moment.

You know the kind of thing I mean: I try to put my slippers in the fridge, I go upstairs and have no idea why I’ve gone upstairs or I can’t think of the word for that thing some people (not me) put in their tea.

That’s milk, of course, in case you’d forgotten. So far, so 70, as you might say.

But the other thing that’s happening is that, alongside the putting of the slippers into the fridge I am struck by a very vivid memory of something that happened decades ago which then.

It’s a common phenomenon of course but it’s interesting that somehow those things you did in the 1970s are crowding out that thing you’re about to do when you’ve ascended the stairs. Whatever it was.

The other day I had a very powerful example of the recent/not so recent memory interface. I was pounding my brain to try to get it hand me the word for that thing that’s almost a hat that women wear on their heads at weddings.

Yes I know it’s a fascinator but I couldn’t fish the word out of the mind pond that morning in the kitchen.

I knew, somehow, that it ended in ‘ator’. I knew the rhythm of the word and if it had a tune I could have sung you the tune.

As I was trying to conjure up the word – yes: fascinator, I know, you’ve told me once – I was suddenly swamped by an image of me and my mates Dave and Bob on our Greyhound Bus Trip to America in 1977.

We’ve come from New York and we’re on our way to Los Angeles. We’re poor students and so we’re sleeping on the bus for two nights at a time and then getting a room in the cheapest hotel we can find.

We’ve been on the road for many days and the bus has made a stop in Winslow, Arizona.

It’s the middle of the night and it’s still baking hot.

Nobody knows why we’ve stopped at this closed bus station that looks like nobody has boarded a bus there since the 1950s but we take advantage of the break to get out and stretch our legs and buy cans of pop from a vending machine, something that still seemed to be a novelty to us northern lads who usually had to walk round to Mrs Batty’s shop to get a can.

Suddenly, Dave, who like me and Bob is a big fan of country rock music, and indeed country rock music was one of the main drivers of our desire to see America, to see the places that those bands like The Flying Burrito Brothers and Poco were singing about, walks over to a corner beside the road.

He says ‘guess what I’m doing?’

Bob and I are so stupefied by lack of sleep that we can’t come up with a reply. ‘Look at me!’ he says, gesturing at the ground. Bob and I remain silent.

It seems to be getting hotter and sweat seems to be dripping from the cowboy hat I bought in Washington DC in preparation for the trip west.

Dave’s voice lifts triumphantly and he begins to sing ‘I’m standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona’ and we cheer so loudly that the driver says ‘okay, folks, back on the bus!’

For those who don’t know, ‘I’m standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona’ is a line from Take It Easy, a slice of pure sublime transcendent country rock by The Eagles.

I think it’s a better song than Hotel California but hey, I’m no expert.

And now it’s 2026 and I’m standing in a corner of my kitchen in Darfield, South Yorkshire and I’m singing a song by The Eagles as I’m transported back to a formative moment in a formative journey almost 50 years ago.

I often think about that road trip and I also don’t think about it quite a lot of the time but it elbows its way into my thinking anyway.

But I still can’t think of the name of that wedding headgear. It’s there somewhere, sitting on the Greyhound Bus near me as we rumble away from that Arizona corner. It’s there. If I can only grasp it.

Fascinator. That’s it: fascinator. Great name for a country rock band.