Tubular Stonehenge

As I was returning to Oxford from Cornwall in the spring of 1974, I received a ride from a man in his early 20s driving a sports car with a great sound system. We were close to Stonehenge. He asked me if I knew the album Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield. I didn’t. He put in a cassette tape of the stunning piece of music to play it for me. We arrived where he was going to turn off to go his way different from my route. We were perhaps 10 minutes from the end of the composition and he insisted I had to hear all of it. He pulled onto the shoulder where he let the cassette finish before we said our goodbyes.

Honest, I didn’t say …