The Final Prediction.

I bought my first guitar when I was fourteen, a fourteen-quid piece of crap that I nicknamed Gladys in total ignorance of B.B. King's similar naming habits.

Until then, my instrument was the wildly phat oboe. (It was supposed to be a gateway toot to the saxophone, but I never got that far.) However, the terminal unhipness of this member of the woodwind family didn't stifle my ambitions for budding rock and roll fame (after all, the original line-up of Roxy Music included an oboist, or "oh-beast" as my mother always pronounced it), and my first planned line-up for a band was me with Chris Cockayne and Jeff Fanning, two cello-playing fellow thirteen-year-olds. Combined, we had the sex appeal of a bottle of paint brush cleaner.

I mention this because the first of many suggested names for this luckily abortive combo was "The Psychedelic Octopus*." Which brings me neatly but glibly to Paul, the psychic octopus.

You can tell the Americans are finally embracing soccer: they're ladling out statistics by the, er, ladle-full. I always thought this US obsession with stats was to stop the punters nodding off during the long lulls that occur in baseball and American football. The football played by the rest of the world, with its two 45-minute halves of continuous action -- so irritating to commercial television -- didn't need to bother with esoterica, at least in my day. There was nothing more taxing to the memory than "Who won the FA cup in 1958?" (Bolton Wanderers, who beat Manchester United 2-0) and "Who scored a hat-trick in England's 4-2 victory over West Germany in the 1966 World Cup final?" (Geoff Hurst, of course) and that's about it. Statistics were for cricket -- a game that's longer than baseball, but just as fast. Which means just as slow.

Soccer is all about possession. If the other team has the ball, no matter where they are on the pitch, you'd better show a desperate avidity to get it back that would make Gollum look like Ghandi, or before you know it, you'll be picking the precious out of the back of your own goal. Ask the England squad.

This morning's New York Times includes a stunning information graphic all about possession. Somebody has determined, for all the games played so far, which team touched the ball more, on a minute by minute basis. Ninety minutes per game, plus thirty minutes overtime for several matches. Translated into a row of ticks color-coordinated to team strip, like a long bar code. Sixty-two matches altogether. All in a space that's about a third of a page. Oh, America admit it -- you love this stuff!

The Netherlands has a pretty respectable history of possession in all their games. But fellow finalist Spain's record is a virtually unbroken ribbon of red, dominating their opponents in every match. And for that reason -- and because they're very, very good -- I'm picking Spain to be the winners tomorrow afternoon, probably 2-0.

And that fortunately puts me in agreement with Paul, the psychic octopus at Germany's Oberhausen Sea Life Aquarium. Presented with his mussel snack in a choice of two containers, each marked with a national flag, Paul has correctly predicted the final outcome of all of Germany's games in this year's World Cup, including their loss to Spain in the semifinals (which scored him some death threats) and today's German victory against Uruguay for third place. And when asked about the final, Paul chose Spain, despite the fact that the average Spaniard would see him more as a tapas than a clairvoyant. See it here.

Which leaves only one question. Not how does Paul do it. (Of course he has an opinion about soccer -- with eight legs, he's 36% of a side on his own, and he'd never be guilty of a hand ball.) But whoever thought about asking him?

*And talking of musical octopuses in 1969 and aquatic beasts called Paul, a belated shout-out to Ringo on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

In my life, I've loved them all.

Yup. The Fab Four. Those lovable moptops from Liverpool.

This blog is an exception for me. Otherwise, I'm a social networking ignoramus. I rarely use facebook, I don't text anymore, and I have never tweeted. But it seems to me that the fodder for most e-traffic is a constantly revolving cast of Kardashians and Gagas and Lohans and Biebers and Britneys and Bowersoxes, all accelerating toward their sixteenth minute while every ounce of flab or hint of ribcage gives birth to another gossipy webpage. (Somebody explain: who is Snookie and why should I care?)

If we'd had those media in England, in 1963, there would have been one topic only: The Beatles. No others need apply. But all we had was the steam radio, black and white television, and the tabloid press, and it was barely enough to contain the exploding phenomenon of Beatlemania.

You had to be there. John, Paul, George, and Ringo -- that habitual order meant something -- weren't merely the zeitgeist, the right band at the right time to fill the vacuum of the recently discovered "teenage" market. (Kids with money? Who knew?)  The music was astounding, of course, and they were articulate, funny, irreverent, interesting, attractive. But tot up the other innovations.

That first British number one hit, "Please Please Me" might have been "How Do You Do It" if the Beatles hadn't held firm on recording songs they'd written themselves, virtually unknown in those Tin Pan Alley days. That second album, With the Beatles, broke new ground with its arthouse portrait on the cover, not your grandmother's portrait of the artist. Elvis had made movies, of course, but who had ever seen a film like Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night? (I complain frequently about the tedium of my home town, the London suburb of Hounslow, but I swell with pride that the "Can't Buy Me Love" sequence for A Hard Day's Night was filmed within its confines.) In the words to "Help!" and "Norwegian Wood," didn't John Lennon beat Joni Mitchell to the personal confession in song?

And when the screaming got too loud, they retreated with unlimited funds and time to EMI's recording studios, forging new sounds and concepts and techniques that led -- a mere four years from "Love Me Do" -- to the pinnacle of 1967's Sergeant Pepper, with, incidentally, more extraordinary cover art and another innovation with the printing of lyrics on the record sleeve. It goes on.

Who remembers Jimmy Nicol? He was world-famous for two weeks in 1964. Ringo Starr came down with tonsillitis -- front page news, naturally! -- and Nicol, a session drummer, was drafted to replace him. Beatles fans hated him for not being Ringo. Then Ringo returned, every second of his recovery and brief convalescence chronicled by the press. (Thousands of fans had clamored for his discarded tonsils; I thought it would be clever to ask for his stitches.) The tabloids showed one last shot of Nicol, walking away alone toward obscurity, and suddenly we all felt sorry for him and wished we'd been kinder during his fortnight of fame. That was the state of Beatlemania in Britain. There have been teen idols since, but nothing that subsumed everything in the culture.

Of course it has an effect, even though they flourished as an intact quartet for only eight years, and had dis-banded by the time I was fourteen. For me, those iconic lives played out in real time in the daily newspapers, the denouements then unknown -- the shocking death of Brian Epstein, the controversial MBEs, the soul-searching -- mine, I mean -- following the "more popular than Jesus" remark, the retreat to and from the Maharishi in India, the morphing hairstyles, the hint of drugs, the rise and fall of Apple, the rise and rise of Yoko. (I remember press coverage of a pre-Lennon Yoko, protesting the banning of her film "No 4," also known as "Bottoms.")

Lennon's words, in his two books of surreal poetry and episodes, still infect my vocabulary -- "Come out the cow with glasses." ("I'd smashed him with a brick.") Apart from Prince Charles, John Lennon is my only good impression. (Honestly, I can't even do Christopher Walken.) Beatles songs were the first music I played when I learned guitar, and they provided the first chord sequences I stole when I started to write songs myself. I had a massive poster of a crew-cut, Plastic Ono Band-era John sporting a "People for Peace" armband on my bedroom wall.

They epitomized a time I knew as childhood. The opening riff of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" is my madeleine in linden tea. And when, ten years after their whimpering breakup, I snapped on my bathroom radio for the news, only to hear of a murder on New York's Upper West Side, I stood in the shower and wept.

Oh sixties, where is your swing?

Stupid memory tricks: I'm haranguing the boys into getting ready for their half-day at school (parent-teacher conferences in the afternoon), and a tune comes into my head from decades ago. It's one of those insidious novelty instrumentals that have infested the pop charts over the years, like "March of the Mods" from 1964, which became a fixture of teenage dances as a kind of update to the conga.

I vaguely recall that the tune was whistled, and from somewhere in the recesses of memory comes the performer's name "Whistling Jack Smith." A quick Google later -- and who's not up for a quick Google on a damp morning? -- and there's the title: "I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman," from 1967.  (A year that otherwise produced some very good stuff. Sergeant Pepper, for example. "All You Need is Love." Spurs beat Chelsea in the F.A. Cup final. Homosexuality was decriminalized in the U.K. The "Summer of Love" began.)

Switch to the glories of YouTube, and you get this.

(Oh, please click. Truly one of the strangest things you'll ever witness. An attempt to do early MTV with three live black and white TV cameras and one man whistling. We were so easily pleased in those days. And apparently -- bless you, Wikipedia -- the character in the video was not Whistling Jack Smith and didn't record the original tune. The whistler who did record the tune wasn't called Jack Smith either, but may have been the same siffleur who did the whistling bits for the soundtrack of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.)

"I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman," as a title, seems to be a play on "I Was Lord Kitchener's Valet," which was also a song (with words!), but this was based on the name of a famous 1960s boutique that popularized the military look used by Jimi Hendrix and -- yes -- the Beatles on the cover of -- yes -- Sergeant Pepper.

I vaguely remembering going into the Piccadilly Circus branch, in the days when I was deemed old enough to be allowed to make the eleven-mile tube trip from Hounslow to central London on my own -- my early teens, early 1970s. I was disappointed that, by then, it just seemed to be another store selling jeans.