For the second year running I have driven the family to and from a New Year's Eve party. Painful on the very evening, but great on the first day of the New Year. No hangover, up with the dawn, and some time to think about what confronts you at work the next day. I spend the morning with Let it Bleed and Exile, tapping out notes on the computer whilst tending a leek and potato soup for the rest of them when they surface. George, 16 and groovy, appears first, in a dressing gown. A bleary squint at daylight, I can see he's struggling with Sweet Virginia.

"Do you really like this?"

Now, George and I have a special relationship when it comes to music. I sang him Dylan songs in his cradle; he and I listen to Van the Man, the Dead, The Doors, Beefheart; I and he listen to The Prodigy, Radiohead, Faithless. His Christmas list included Electric Ladyland and John Wesley Harding alongside Grandaddy, Lambchop and Kruder and Dorfmeister. We do the odd concert, the odd festival (I segue into the background), he holds his own with my contemporaries; so what's this with the Stones?

It worries me. Have I overlooked part of his education? They are, or certainly were, a fact of life. In the same way as Dylan, it was never a matter of taste, a case of "like" or "dislike", the fact was that these people are masters, unavoidable, unignorable, part of the architecture, the infrastructure of being aware. Being alive.

I play him Sympathy for the Devil.

Problem solved.

By the time the soup is ready to eat, the rest of the family - Amelia, a 13 year-old shop-to-dropper Robbie Williams sweetie, and my wife Ailsa (a dyed-in-the-wool Sticky Fingers girl) - have revisited consciousness, and are jiving gently around the kitchen in various states of undress. The fact is that this stuff is timeless. Wild, wild horses couldn't drag them away. A good way to start the year.