55. people in their seventies

Passport photo aged 14, near the start of the decade. My first year at boarding school, hence the facial expression.

Christ, that last chapter was hard work. Took a fucking age to write.

Agreed, that's partly because it was the longest so far. But mainly my heart wasn't in it. It's simply not about the band when the band mattered to us. No wonder I suggested you shouldn't read it.

But I'm not tempted to say the same about this next one. Even though it's considerably longer and this time there's no music at all!

Thought I'd add some context. Bit of social history. That's what you become as you get older.

So read all about it. The decade we lived through when we started as a band.

Because I could never have started one after that.

Find out why by scrolling right to the end. Or take the scenic route. It's got Thatcher, tasers, guardian angels in stations and parks, toilets shaped like phoneboxes, and false teeth down a latrine. Hold tight.

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The 1970s took a long time to arrive, then lasted for ever, because we were young.

Actually I remember 1960. Almost the day it came into being.

I was in my second term at primary school, therefore just before my fifth birthday. I can still see our teacher flipping the calendar on a high shelf, leaving 1959 behind - though that's the only moment I thought a date meant anything. The rest of the Sixties, I just lived. They were my childhood and early teens, when you don't ponder the significance of time.

Having said that, when 1970 came round, it was weird. My whole life had started with a six, every year taking an age to go by, and the new digit was just plain wrong. I remember thinking we'd never reach that fat eight, which was really grotesque. Instead, of course, the Eighties shot past (good, because the music was shit!), the decades after that even more so. The millennium seems only a few years ago.

But the 1970s took an age. I was at school for the first two years, then four at college and the rest as a young man at work. A lot going on.

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As a result, I've got no overview of that decade.

For a start, there wasn't another one to compare it with. The '60s ended when I was fourteen. Also, when you're young, every stage of being young, you tend to think about yourself and your immediate surroundings. At college, I was aware of the Cold War and the nuclear threat, the occasional strike, and I've mentioned changes in the food we could buy and the way women were treated - but most of the time you're micro-managing. You could say I was more optimistic about the future of the planet because I didn't think about it much!

There again, that was fair enough. The Earth didn't seem to be on fire yet.

Some people treated the 2022 heatwave as just another 1976, a blip. In fact it was completely different.

It's true that '76 was hot as shit. The year before had been very warm, but this was more brutal. Two weeks of temperatures over 30, a top of 35.

It was the only year I went to Wimbledon. The girlfriend was with me and people gave us their tickets for the show courts. But you queued in crushing heat, I spent the day in a singlet, and they carried people out on stretchers, including a big burly sailor in a white uniform. Working at a mental hospital that summer, I came out into a courtyard one afternoon and stepped into an outdoor oven.

But we didn't think about global warming, because that year was a one-off. 2022 was scarier, because it was here to stay.

In Britain, the temperature was several degrees higher than '76, reaching 40 for the first time. And it wasn't alone. Spain, Portugal, France, Italy all hit 40+ for days on end, forest fires forcing people to leave their homes. Places in southern Asia were almost 50 in the shade.

And it's been like that for years. Nine of the ten hottest days in Britain were after 1989 (1976 doesn't get a look-in), and the 2003 heatwave killed 70,000 in Europe, including thousands of old people in France, where the mortuaries ran out of room. You die because you overheat to the point where you can't sweat, so you don't cool down, as I discovered on the hottest day in british history up till then, when I went jogging at noon!

But the source of all this heat could've been dealt with in the 70s.

When OPEC sent oil prices through the roof in 1973, that was the time to get serious about reducing the West's dependence on fossil fuels. Instead we left things in the hands of Middle Eastern states, with the by-product of turning muslims into the enemy. The USA has to have an enemy.

So now, in the 2020s, the planet's burning faster than fifty years ago. It won't be saved by the right-wing populist monsters in charge of various countries - though those were around in the Seventies too, committing other crimes. Military governments in South America tortured and 'disappeared' tens of thousands of people. I wrote a piece in a football mag about countries there that raped women with trained dogs. The editor wanted to take the line out. Mate, I said, it's the line you have to leave in. He agreed and published.

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Here in Britain, images of the 1970s invariably include the three-day week, blackouts from the miners' strike, and rubbish piled up on the streets during another bout of industrial action, in the Winter of Discontent.

But these are pushed at you by the right-wing press, to diss the decade before the glories of thatcherism: portraying the Seventies as a time of high taxation and those terrible unions holding the country back when what they actually did was protect working people a bit more.

The strikes didn't last long, and that decade was better in some ways. But refuse collection was a complicated issue, with pros and cons.

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For a start, most people didn't know recycling existed.

There may have been some communal depositories, but I never heard of any. Councils weren't obliged to provide recycling bins for another forty years or so.

A lot of dustbins were still metal, there were no wheelies, and you weren't obliged to bag your rubbish first. So dustmen had to carry a heavy bin on their shoulder before tipping loose garbage into the trucks. The song I sang so badly gives you some idea. It's good they have it a lot easier now.

Those bins had seen better days. Those bin men maybe not.

You could argue that we used a lot fewer black bags, so the rubbish degraded faster in landfill. But because we didn't recycle, those sites were full of items that could've been used again.

Having said that...

You bought most of your drinks in glass bottles. Fizzy drinks, fruit squash, milk, beer. A milkman left the bottles on your front step. When you finished them, you rinsed them out and left them out there again. They were taken back to the depot, sterilised, and re-used. Can't do that with today's billions of tetrapaks.

Beer bottles and soft drinks you took back to the shop or the off-licence, who gave you thruppence for each one, just over a penny in today's money. These went back to the brewery or factory for more recycling.

Any old bottles you found as a kid were gold nuggets. For some of us, they took the place of pocket money. You'd hear of boys climbing over a pub wall, nicking a crate of empty bottles, and selling them somewhere else, but I didn't know anyone who pulled that off.

Meanwhile we didn't have so many plastic carrier bags.

Brown paper instead, which you then put to other uses. We wrapped our school books in it, to protect items that were public property (no-one had to buy their own books). You'd personalise them with your name and an illustration and take a bit of pride in it.

Grown-ups used brown paper to wrap fragile articles they wanted to post. It biodegraded faster than styrofoam or bubble wrap.

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roulette wheels

The 70s helped the environment in other ways too. A lot of working people didn't own a car.

On the Slade, where I spent the last year at Oxford, you'd see streams of men cycling home from Cowley Works, keeping the air cleaner after a day making cars they couldn't afford.

But unlike now, car ownership was being encouraged. Being able to go where you wanted was a mark of freedom.

That had something to do with the number of cars. A lot less of them, so more room on the roads.

When I was a kid, right at the end of the 60s, we played marbles on the road, the tarmac, using the kerb, in quite a built-up area. Had to stop that when they changed to one-way streets, to deal with the increase in traffic.

In 1970, Britain had 13½ million licensed vehicles. By March 2022, it was three times as many:  40 million. But road building hasn't kept up: only a quarter more, so traffic's been getting much heavier.

Fewer cars also meant more parking spaces - and many more that were free. In the 70s, you really could pull up on a high street and leave your motor long enough to go shopping or even eat out or see a film. Councils were better funded then (hence healthier school meals), so they didn't think of car parks as a way of raising revenue. And clamping didn't exist yet.

But you can call this a golden age for cars and car parking only if you ignore a major stat. Nowadays fewer people die on the roads.

Take 1970 again. A total of 7,499 deaths related to traffic. Today it's a third of that, despite the increase in volume, ten times fewer fatalities per motor mile.

Seat belts became compulsory, speed bumps were built, cars were redesigned, and CCTV cameras were put in - to catch drunk drivers. That's the biggest reason for more people living to tell the tale. A lot of people used to drive when pissed. A lot. Despite government advertising campaigns.

The mental hospital I worked in, it was out in the countryside. The number of times I was given a lift by people who should've been having a lie-down, not sitting behind a wheel. Bit of a fucking lottery, frankly - though you didn't think so at the time. It was just the way it was, and you were drunk too.

People drove like that it towns too. And not just in the Seventies. In 1982, when the Milkins played a gig in Battersea, I was driven home by a girl who scraped two parked cars on the way!

As more and more people had cars, they started using them for the slightest trip.

In the 80s, when I lived in Shepherd's Bush, one of my neighbours round the corner had worked at the same advertising company as me. Now she'd drive to the end of her road to shop at Damas Gate and so on - a distance of two hundred yards. When I ticked her off, she'd say I know, I know, I shouldn't. I claim I did my bit for the environment by never learning to drive, the last thing you need in London.

Back in the 70s, more of us walked to the shops, and I don't remember many buildings with lifts.

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Back to other examples of how green we were.

Disposable nappies hadn't taken over completely, so you washed the ones made of towelling and used them again, pristine white after going through the hottest setting. For other items, you used laundrettes more than now. My dad had a washing machine, eventually, but he hardly used it. Preferred wheeling his load to the one in Caversham till he died. Apart from anything else, they were places to meet people.

A lot of houses still didn't have clothes dryers. Washing lines instead, or radiators, which therefore did two jobs, in my house to this day.

There was only one radio or TV in a house, and lawnmowers weren't all electric yet, so you got some exercise by pushing them.

You replaced the blades in a razor rather than throwing away plastic ones - again, in their billions - though I admit I switched to plastic when the twin blades came in.

We drank water from taps or public fountains (remember those?) instead of buying it in plastic bottles for no benefit at all. Remember public toilets? They were in every town centre, some of them with attendants, and in every park until councils cut down on park keepers, who also kept parks safer. So did the two men at every small railway station. All gone now.

Sounds like I'm going to the other extreme and saying the Seventies were paradise lost. No.

If there was full employment or thereabouts, low wages had something to do with it. Dentists still tended to extract a tooth rather than saving it, and millions like my dad were smoking themselves to death. Parents slapped their kids and teachers hit you with bamboo sticks and police beat up students with long hair and some mental patients were brutalised in big institutions, including the one I worked in (there was a documentary: Silent Minority). We didn't clean up after our dogs.

But I'm just saying be careful about what you read. The tory press don't want a return to a decade when Labour seemed the natural party of power and earnings were spread more evenly.

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Therefore money next. Start by giving you an idea about inflation.

My wage at the mental hospital was just over £40 a week. Being a student, I didn't pay tax on that, which struck me as unfair because the other ward orderlies were taxed, and they had families to bring up. Assuming both parents went to work, they'd be running a household with two kids on less than three hundred a month.

But these things are relative. I keep on about 50p pizzas, and fruit was cheap too: twelve cox's apples for a quid (only ten golden delicious; go figure), large oranges and grapefruits at five p each. When a can of coke reached 10p we nearly choked. When a rail ticket from Reading to Paddington hit 98p, we said if it goes over a pound we'll never take a train again.

A major thing: we were paid in cash. Little brown envelopes with rows of holes in, to - what? - let the paper notes breathe? Coins in there as well. It wasn't just me who didn't have a bank account: a lot of working people too (my advertising company ran a TV campaign to persuade them to open one).

Same with ATMs. When they first appeared, you could take out a maximum of ten quid. The one at Barclay's in Oxford was down a dark little side street, and Bernie got me to stand guard when he used it! I wrote radio commercials about them, for people who couldn't come out at night: burglars, witches, Dracula and his Mrs ('Silence, you old bat!'). Those fine character actors Stephen Greif (who died while I was writing this) and Sheila Hancock.

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Tell people today that the '70s were a time of low unemployment and you'll be greeted with shrugs. Nothing's changed, they'll say. In 2022 the tory government bigged up the number of people in work. But there's jobs and jobs. A lot of them are low paid. Forty percent of people on universal credit are in work. Imagine that. Their jobs pay so little they need the fucking dole.

In the Seventies, pay was low but not so bad you had to top it up with social security. And if there were any food banks, there can't have been many because we never heard about them. Soup kitchens for the homeless, but not working families.

The main issue, as I remember it, was the types of job.

Britain still had a manufacturing industry to speak of. And there were coal mines and working seaports. When unemployment soared under Thatcher, journalists couldn't understand what kids in the decade before her had moaned about. They had a job, therefore money and a place to live. What more did they want?

But young people didn't want the work on offer, the ones their parents had done. Me, for instance, I wasn't going to work in a mental hospital. And the Clash didn't believe in the dignity of all labour:

The men in the factory are old and cunning

Boy get running

It's the best days of your life they want to steal

After that, from the Eighties onwards, I don't know, maybe kids would've welcomed the choice of disliking their jobs, as opposed to not having one that paid properly. Thatcher destroyed coal mining (not such a bad thing) and shipbuilding, while Reagan turned whole swathes of the US into the Rust Belt.

I've been talking in broad strokes here, but they paint the right picture.

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Whether you wanted the jobs or not, there were many more different types. In the Seventies, a lot of work was more labour-intensive.

Some changes have made things better. No-one using a phone wants to go through a manual switchboard any more. You can still see the buildings, the telephone exchanges, which used to employ hundreds of thousands, mainly women, and they were still in use before 1975.

Self check-outs at supermarkets make sense too. With all respect, staff handling your purchases are just adding machines, doing something customers can do themselves.

We don't miss milkmen coming round our houses on their floats (though all those glass bottles were better for the environment because the dairy companies recycled them).

We don't regret the passing of porters at railway stations, or ticket collectors there and on buses. Oystercards and mobile phones are more efficient, especially at tube and overland stations, mainly because of the automatic gates, which make it very hard to sneak through without paying.

But a number of amendments saved money without improving things.

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lighthouse keepers

Walk through a public park nowadays and you'll hardly notice the graffiti on disused toilets and litter on the grass and basketball courts - because you're so used to it. It's there because of something you won't see. A park keeper.

In 1970s Reading, the main parks - and even the little one near our house - invariably had two or more keepers. The older one, often on the edge of retirement, was invariably known as Keep. He (it was always a he) was either friendly in a bluff grown-up way or seriously intimidating. His apprentice might've been just out of school. For kids like us trying to get up to mischief, they were a pain in the arse!

You couldn't get away with anything. Even something as harmless as riding your bike on the grass could have you hunted down.

Cross the Gosbrook Road from our little park and you were in another one, then a much bigger one, Christchurch Meadows, with tennis courts where I played with Martin Walsh, football pitches, a paddling pool, a changing-room block, and a lot of trees. A putting green where we used to drive the ball between the silver birches instead of tapping it along the grass; willows and elderberries along a little stream; a line of roadside poplars which had to be cut down and replanted further back because their roots were lifting the tarmac -

And flowers round a park keeper's hut with a thatched roof replaced by tiles when someone burned it down!

If I'd still been a kid when that happened, I might've believed it was revenge against the boss keeper. We didn't like him at all.

One afternoon I'm riding my bike across the main park. I didn't learn till I was eleven and I wasn't much good at it, especially on long grass - but I knew I could outpace the little sod when he emerged from his hut and uttered the classic cry of all park keepers - 'Oi!'  - followed by an exhortation to dismount and walk. Bollocks to that, and I left the park by the gate on Gosbrook. When I came out of a shop with a bag of sweets, the Keep was standing by my bike!

Takes some serious dedication and bloodymindedness to follow someone on foot, and some proper smarts to assume your quarry might buy sweets instead of cycling off. But that's what he was like. A right little terrier.

Naturally he gave me grief for cycling in his park. Then he asked what school I went to.

In those days. you didn't lie to men in authority, so I told him. St Anne's. You could see it from where we were.

Then he asked my name, which meant he was going to report me to the nuns. I might get the slipper for it. But again I wasn't going to pretend.

Cristiano Freddi.

Don't give me that!

He never did report me. But I never cycled in that park again.

When I became a student, I used to go to his hut to pay for a tennis court - and he was alright by then. Maybe he'd mellowed, or more likely I saw him through more adult eyes and realised the job he did.

For a start, he had entire fields of grass to mow. Bushes to trim, the paddling pool to clean out in spring. He made you pick up your litter - and he kept the place safe as well as clean, nipping any aggro in the bud, making you keep dogs on a lead. He had different assistants over time, but he was a constant for years. I never asked his name. He already knew mine!

The actual hut, with its brickwork chimney. I don’t remember when the blue fencing went up, but the kids’ paddling pool was always there.The wooden cabin on the right is where they kept the golf clubs and so on. Looks like someone’s just given the poplars a crewcut..

When that little Keep stood outside his thatched hut drinking tea on a sunny evening, you knew things were alright with the world. His place was a safe house, a beacon watching out for us. If we didn't appreciate it at the time, it was because all parks were like that. Keepers were a given.

Even in the small park across the road, nearer our house.

The head keeper there seemed to drink a lot of tea, He or his assistant brewed it in the tiny wooden hut next to a seating area with a big wooden roof. This looked out of place in a park that size, more like something you'd find at a bus station. Young teens used to hang out there with their girlfriends (not me, sadly), but there was never any trouble. Because there were park keepers.

Here the main man was older and more heavily built and had less work to do, hence all the tea. Not so much grass to cut, and the row of bushes along one side were allowed to grow thick. But he maintained the creepy toilets in one corner and kept an eye on little kids like me when we used the truly dangerous playground apparatus (all of them big and metal, with concrete underneath, not that rubberised material for softies).

The keep didn't mind us throwing branches up into the giant trees to knock conkers down, and we played tennis without nets on the concrete square (I couldn't afford the proper courts in the big park) and cricket with tennis balls on the grass. Years later, when Robin spent a summer holiday at our house and worked at the mental hospital, we played football on that concrete square, one-on-one with another tennis ball.

Wasn't too long before they covered that square with a little playground for toddlers. Pulled down all the metal too: the big slide and the rocking horse and terrifying roundabout (one slip at that speed and you lost skin on the concrete). Too unsafe without a park keeper to watch over you.

This little park didn't really need two men to tend it, but even just the one disappeared decades ago. I don't suppose the place became a den of drugs and knife crime - and things weren't perfect back then (the arson proves it) - but like every public park in the country, it was definitely more secure when someone was employed to look after it.

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Compare and contrast.

I got married in 2007. Earlier that year, we'd moved into our first home as a couple, up in darkest Wood Green, north London. Really nice house, shit neighbours at the back, a bunch of polish builders who kept us awake at night even when our two-year-old kid was crying. The poles next door to them were fine: quiet and educated - but I'd have happily hanged those bastards. If anything, the park was even worse.

It was a small space on a corner at the end of our short street, next to a bowling green. Rose bushes and scattered trees, benches, even a mini pavilion. I played there with our kid when he was three and four, some proper adventures in the greenery and he rode his bike on the disused tennis courts.

The grass was cut regularly and the bushes trimmed, but the place was too small to have a park keeper, so it turned into a rubbish tip and dog toilet.

Not by itself, of course. A group of romanians took over the benches. Nothing wrong with that - except they'd eat millions of fucking sunflower seeds and leave the husks on the ground, where you'd see them for days. Meanwhile a bulgarian who lived across the road used to exercise his dogs there.

A sign told him they had to be on a lead and ball games weren't allowed. So what does this cunt do? Brings one of those plastic ball slingers that send a ball flying like a pelota scoop. His dogs smashed through the roses and terrorised little kids.

I told him about it. Twice. A six-year-old girl who was a friend of my son, she told him too, and she had a seriously loud voice. But he didn't stop, and the council wouldn't talk to him despite my emails. We were glad to leave the area, though it took us six years. Those polish fuckers.

Another bunch of bulgarians used to leave piles of empty cans of beer on the grass or on the tennis courts next door. One day I even found a plastic bag full of dog shit. Yeh, really. Pale and a lot of it. Someone had obviously saved it up, then decided our little park was the best place to deposit the stuff. Not even one of the bins in the park: they left the bag on the lawn. Someone explain that to me.

A homeless man used to sleep on the steps of the pavilion, which was fine by me - until he was sick everywhere and scared our kid.

Goes without saying none of this would've happened if we'd had a park keeper. They really did make our world a better place.

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They did that by keeping things safe. But we didn't always want that. The Seventies was when they brought in adventure playgrounds. And we'd never needed those.

When I was small, Reading, where I grew up, had a lot more rough land and derelict buildings in the Sixties. Not bombed in the war, I don't think, probably just left like that because people didn't have money for building or repair. These were great places to play. You could sit in an abandoned car and pretend to be on a heist, using the shattered windscreen pieces as stolen diamonds.

Mind you, these areas had their hidden perils. They were often covered in ground elder, and you couldn't see what was under it. One day I trod on a piece of wood with a long screw sticking up. Went through my sandal and deep into the arch. My mum unscrewed it and I was fine. Kids were forever getting fingers trapped in those car doors or shooting each other with .177 air pistols or bows and arrows cut from sycamores. Brilliant. And we set up camp in the spooky bomb shelters, if that's what they were.

Got to say it: kids today don't know what they're missing. Though they find out sometimes.

In 2019, when my boy's primary school broke up for the summer, a dozen of them went to the local park. Behind a line of trees, they found an abandoned riding school.

Sawdust floor, broken chairs and stalls, long bits of plastic tubing, empty syringes for the horses. My son and his pals had the best day. They told me so, but I already knew they would. Because they did what we had to do in the absence of 'adventure playgrounds' and skate parks: they had a real adventure. They explored and used their imagination.

Something we always did in those days was light fires. Not arson, small camp fires. My boy did it with his mates, but there were more places in my day.

You'd find a hidden spot to build a camp with planks of wood and leafy branches and car tyres, and you'd nicked a box of matches from home. There was no motive in starting a fire, except you'd seen castaways do it on films, though you could roast those sour cooking apples you'd scrumped.

One day, three of us are by the river opposite that power station when we come across a willow tree with a massive hole in it. Perfect place to light a fire, we think. Because we're stupid. Grammar school boys but not an excess of common sense. So we collect grass and twigs and strike a match.

But the tree's dying. The hole goes right up through the top and acts like a flue. The air sucks the flames up and they start burning the whole tree. We don't panic. We try to put the fire out. With a wellington boot! We find one in the nettles and start filling it from the river. But the fire's too far gone. So now we do panic. We leg it across the field, reach a gate in a fence - and run smack into a couple of firemen! Oh shit.

Have you seen a tree burning round here, lads?

Yeh, and two boys running away over there.

Thanks.

True in every detail.

But the best fun we had with that power station was around Guy Fawkes Night.

Councils didn't have money for public fireworks displays. If you were lucky, someone might build a bonfire somewhere, but most people had to let off fireworks at home. They were expensive, so you'd get a couple of catherine wheels, tied safely to a stick in the ground, a sparkler each, and maybe a rocket if your dad was flush. That was it.

But for us rogues and ruffians, bangers were the thing. Watching sparklers and roman candles was for girls (my sister's birthday was the day after, and my mum was furious when I bought her fireworks one year). What boys wanted was noise, an explosion. So we'd buy as many penny bangers as we could afford. In those days, shopkeepers would sell them to kids. We threw them at each other or shoved them in people's handlebars. Can't remember anyone getting hurt, so it was obviously a safe thing to do.

The best bangers were the thrupenny ones. Three pence was worth just over one penny after decimalisation, enough for a bus ride or three big chewy sweets. The bangers were red and thick and fucking scary. We loved them.

Ideally, you wanted them as long-range missiles. Tie one to a rocket and launch it, so it would explode in mid-air. But it was surprisingly hard to get right. You'd fire a rocket from an empty milk bottle, but one day the bottle fell on its side and the rocket shot along the ground and nearly hit our labrador. She must've been a police dog in a former life, because she didn't even blink.

But one day we did get it right. And oh boy.

It's 1968 and I'm thirteen. We're across the stream from that factory again. And we've got a thrupenny banger attached to a rocket. The plan was to launch the rocket over the factory wall and hear the banger explode on the other side. And for once the plan worked. The rocket whooshed as intended, there was a beat, then an almighty fucking explosion. There must've been some sort of compound on the other side of the wall, and the acoustics were perfect for bangers worth three times an ordinary one. I doubt it did any harm in all that concrete and stone, but we were chased by men in white coats. Epic. Kids can't have memories like that today.

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policed stations

We didn't live near a small railway station. If we had, we'd probably have wanted to play on it. But we couldn't have. They were as safe as parks. They used to have two people too.

Presumably some women in this case, though it was always men at the minor stations I knew.

They drank tea as well. But they also kept stations clean and trimmed the flowerbeds, and discouraged graffiti just by being there.

And in a way they were more important than park keepers, because they checked tickets every time a train came in, which must've saved British Rail a packet. Now the only staff in these places are in ticket offices, which aren't always open; anyway most small stations have ticket machines instead, or nothing at all. If you're making a short journey, you can get away without paying (ticket inspectors on trains are another group that's been disappearing), so cutting all these staff looks like a false economy to me. There were thousands of them, but they were never highly paid.

Plus there's the same question of safety as in parks, only more so. Women getting off the last train had the station master to see them out. Some places I've been to, I wouldn't want to be walking out of there alone at night.

It's true that stations have CCTV now, but although that might help you catch a perpetrator, station masters put you off perpetrating in the first place. Those guys deserved their tea breaks.

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cabin cruisers

If you saw anything untoward at a railway station, or anywhere, you'd have to phone it in from a call box. Before mobile phones, it's all we had, and you could call them a community hub.  Imagine queuing to make a call. No really, use your imagination. Because it happened.

An old lady banged on the glass when I spent a while calling the girlfriend. There were two other people behind her. I did my share of waiting too, once for some guy to have a piss in one! I didn't know where the next phonebox was, so in I went. Made that a very quick call!

Those old phoneboxes were lit at night. Why he'd want to have a slash under an overhead light, I never understood. Find a dark place like the rest of us.

You came to expect the smell of piss in the old red boxes. Less so in the ones that replaced them, the KX100s in the 1980s. They weren't much liked, but I found them better to use. The doors on the old red monsters were seriously heavy, hard to open if you were old or infirm. No such problem with the KX100, which was also wheelchair accessible. And the glass doors didn't reach the ground, so the cabins never reeked of urine. Draughty in winter, but you didn't intend spending much time in them. They were the last public phoneboxes, so don't knock 'em. Icons of the future.

Apparently they were harder to vandalise, too. But I don't remember any of the old red ones being wrecked. Odd bit of graffiti, but they were sturdy bits of kit.

Even the things in them that seemed vulnerable were generally left alone.

In some phone cabins - not many, in big cities and major train stations - you'd look to the left of the phone and slightly below it and see a small metal shelf divided into segments by a line of grooves facing you. Lift up one of those segments and you'd get a local telephone directory. They hung from the bottom of those metal clasps, which rotated upwards through 180 degrees so you could open the directory out on the rets of the shelf. They weren't really necessary (phone directory enquiries instead), and they were prime for defacing or even burning - but if that happened, again I never saw it. There seems to be more spray paint now that phone boxes are hardly ever used.

These were still the red ones, with the small windows, iconic as a London bus. You still see a lot of them around. Their replacements, with the thin silvery skeleton and three glass doors, they seem to have been around for ever but  didn't appear till the mid Eighties, after BT was privatised. Their doors were lighter and easier to open (the old red ones needed a real heave), and they had better ventilation, so they didn't get so mouldy, which was fine in summer, but they let air in round your ankles whereas the old reds were warmer in winter for those long calls that led to queues.

No lines of people waiting in the mid Sixties, when most people didn't even think of using a phone. As a kid, I caught the tail end of the old A and B buttons.

At that age, you needed both hands to pull the red doors open. The phone itself was one of those big heavy black things, and you dialled by using a finger into a small circle and rotating a mini wheel. The emergency number 999 meant you could put two fingers inside the last two numbers, 9 and 0, which let you dial even in the dark. Betcha didn't know that.

This old phone was accompanied by a metal box in the same colour. You put four old pennies in a slot, one after the other, worth about 1½ p now, dialled the number, then waited. If someone replied at the other end, you pushed a button marked A and your coins dropped into a box inside. For those four pence, you got an unlimited amount of time (precisely because so few people made phone calls, so the country could afford it). If no-one answered, you pressed B and got your money back. Much more thrilling than nowadays.

I'd even go in just to be inside this enthralling place (futuristic even before Dr Who travelled in something similar). When I was eight or nine, I picked up the phone once, dialled a random set of numbers without putting any money in, then asked if John was in. Imagine my shock when a male voice said 'John here'! An operator must've been listening in for some reason. I put the phone back and scarpered.

When decimal currency came in, the cost of a call went up from fourpence to two new p, and you had to add more coins for a longer call (a series of pips would warn you the money was running out). Then when the price went from a brown 2p coin to a silver 5p, it seemed fair enough: the old rate had been around for years, though it didn't stop Bernie Cook muttering about an increase of 250%!

The A and B button system might sound a bit complicated, but it was infinitely better than the arrangement on the continent, in Italy and France at least. The gettoni, les jetons, were a really stupid idea.

They were based on a medieval barter system apparently, with no place in the 20th fucking Century. They were tokens. You bought them to use in a public telephone. While we were using coins, which everybody had, over there you had to go to a bar or a newspaper kiosk or somewhere - and hope they hadn't run out. I even found a phone cabin in France which had a small machine for dispensing jetons! So you put coins in one slot to buy something the shape and size of a coin to put in another one. No idea when the, er, penny dropped and they cut out the middle man. Ridiculous.

Putting coins in a phone gave you the outside chance of retrieving them. Same with gettoni maybe, which were more precious in a way.

I presume you could use the same method with the old B button. When that black box was replaced by the new pale grey phones, you could still get your money back if no-one picked up at the other end. Instead of pressing a button, you just replaced the receiver and the machine would send your coins back out. There was a metal pocket where they came out, and sometimes you'd slip your fingers up into the chute to see if anyone had stuffed tissue paper up there. If you were lucky enough to find any, you'd pull it out and coins would follow. Someone had blocked the chute to stop them coming out. It meant the person who made the next call lost their money, They'd think the phone was broken and complain about a BT rip-off. Surprising how long it took some people to get wise to the ruse.

Those red boxes are still around in quite big numbers, but they're still part of a disappearance, like milkmen and their milk floats. The phone boxes are there but not the people using them. Someone in an emergency maybe, or somewhere remote, places where the mobile signals aren't strong. But in a town, I can't remember the last time I saw anyone in one. It was probably me.

British phonebox in Germany. Unusual library in Bonn 2020. That’s me next to it, but Martin Neubert cut me out. Quality control.

I don't want to sound rose-tinted - using a public phone could be a pain sometimes - but the processes you had to go through made it a bit of a ceremony, like a cup of looseleaf tea, with a teapot and strainer, as opposed to teabags. You didn't make all that many calls, so they were always something of an event.

                                                                   *

Reason you didn't use the phone so much: it was expensive, relatively speaking.

If you shared a house or flat, you'd keep a log of the calls you made, duration of call and so on. You almost never called abroad.

And hard-up students reversed the charges when they rang home. I've had people reverse them on me. Hard to believe it happens much now.

                                                                   *

Not just the cost. Mobile phones are so convenient you don't know they are. But they do stop you talking to people.

In 2006, I'm on a train at Parma station, waiting for it to pull out and cross the river to where my cousins live. I'm in a seat on the right, with no-one else in the compartment.

Eventually, a girl gets on, probably late teens, and sits in one of the group of four seats across the aisle from me. Then a mate of hers arrives. Then two more, one of them male, and they sit together and natter. I look out of the window to my right and enjoy just being at a station in Italy. Loved them as a kid.

Before long, I notice there's silence around me again. I look to my left, and the four of them are all on their mobile phones.

If we'd had them, we'd have probably done the same. Instead we talked to each other. Me and my best mate Mick would roam round Reading and the countryside and never stop nattering. People still meet up to chat, but not always to each other.

I've seen pairs of kids coming towards me on the street, both of them on their mobiles. I've sat with a mate of mine, a well-known sportswriter, watched him take his phone out every few minutes, then told him to switch it off or I'd put it where he didn't want it. My son takes his into the toilet!

In 2022 the England football team had a psychologist who encouraged the players to put their mobiles away in training camps. Interact with who's around you, young people. Become a team.

Seems to me social media makes us the opposite. Anti-social media. Expressing hatred for people you'll never meet. The stress from vicious cowardly trolls you can't track down. Unless there's an end to anonimity and all users have to register with the police, I'll never be on any of it, and never feel I lost out

Also, mobile phones make public transport noisier. In my time, you could think your thoughts. Important for a writer, or a lazy daydreamer. That back seat on a Routemaster. Now I won't get on a bus without earphones. No quieter than what's around me, but at least it's my racket and not someone else's full fucking volume

                                                                   *

Not just mobiles. I said most working people didn't have landlines either. So if you wanted your mates to come out and play, you had to go over there and ask.

Mick lived on the same street, but sometimes I'd slog up the hills onto Caversham Heights and knock on a door.

Is Peter in?

No, he's out. Come back at six.

OK.

Sometimes mums would reward me with a glass of squash, or a biscuit for the trek home, but I never minded those expeditions. It's what you were used to. When my dad first came to England, he sometimes marched six miles back from work to save the bus fare. Same reason I often walked two miles from school.

Other times I'd take a train from Reading to Twyford to see someone. His parents didn't have a phone, so he wasn't always there and I just came home. That's how it was. Just as well I liked railway stations.

My dad didn't have a phone either, till he retired in the late Eighties. People rang him at the hospital or just dropped round. There was more dropping round in those days. Made you more of a community somehow. We encouraged it with our kid and his mates.

                                                                   *

As a society, seems to me we get out less than we did. By which I mean we don't mix as much. I'm not sure stats prove that, but it's the feeling I've been getting over the years.

I'm not talking about restaurants post-lockdown. You don't engage with other groups in restaurants, unless you're the noisy cunts ruining people's evenings on that table for eight. I mean pubs. There's nowhere near as many of them. That I do have the figures for.

Growing up in an italian household, pubs weren't part of our culture, so I've never been much of a drinker. And women, even british women, didn't use them all that much, kids not at all. But there were a lot of them about.

By 2022, England and Wales had 7,000 fewer than ten years before. And the pandemic was only a small part of it. Back in 2009, a policeman friend of mine mentioned country pubs disappearing across Hertfordshire.

In towns, I imagine the first to go were the ones down sidestreets. Not enough passing trade. It happened on the road where I lived in Shepherd's Bush. Much more recently, I've seen two close down since we moved to Grove Park. In Lee not far away, a busy junction had the Old Tiger's Head opposite the New Tiger's Head. The new one's a food store now. A hundred yards away, the Edmund Halley shut down in 2022.

Reminds me of the White Horse and Black Horse in in the 1970s, across the road from each other in Emmer Green, scene of a great party when I was eighteen. I think they're both still there.

Meanwhile here in southeast London, facing Grove Park Station, the Baring Hall Hotel was left to rot after lockdown.

The owners have been trying to convert it into flats for years. They've been turned down, but maybe they believe they can outlast the council. So it's been unused since 2020, despite various petitions. Newspapers over the windows, paint peeling off the frames.

Shame, because it was cool place. My wife had birthday bashes there, and I went drinking with guys who had kids at my boy's school.

It was gutted by a fire in 2009 (slight suspicion of suspicious circumstances) and the owners planned to demolish it. But campaigners went to the high court (it's a listed building) and eventually it re-opened. Refurbishment didn't include re-painting the interior. The walls were left as they were by the fire, with charred woodwork and traces of burned wallpaper. Gave it a punk look, with a music selection to match. A lot of craft beers, which don't matter to me, and craft ciders, which do, plus some good chefs and a crazy dark toilet. It was the only pub anywhere near the station. A lot of them used to have a railway tavern.

In 2023 it was bought by someone who intended to keep it as a pub. Good luck with that: months later, teenagers were climbing through a broken upstairs window with torches..

The metal shutters have been up for quite a while.

                                                                   *

when everyone shared the same views

I had a black-and-white telly into the Eighties. An indoor arial you had to move about.

Before that, when colour TV came in, it was a real status symbol. Paul O'Grady: 'My mum wouldn’t let us watch old films in case the neighbours saw and thought we still had an old TV'!

As I say in the intro, we had only three channels in total, so we all watched the same things.

Sometimes we didn't watch anything, because the BBC didn't transmit during various times of the day, when you were at work or in school. We were all familiar with the test card, showing a young girl chalking on a board, which ran till the BBC went 24 hours in the late 90s.

And there was nothing after midnight, the witching hour for telly. The national anthem would play, then the screen would turn to static till the morning.

Programmes might run till one o'clock at weekends. On sunday night, the last showing was The Epilogue, a religious progamme with that unspeakable old twat Malcolm Muggeridge, of Life of Brain fame. But during the week, it was always midnight and off.

I agreed with Michael Caine, who said programmes ended at that time because the government didn't trust working people to get up the next day. Same with breakfast TV: in 1981, a lot of MPs tried to block it so the public wouldn't be late for work. As late as 1983, Ireland's monopoly state broadcaster RUV showed no telly programmes in July!

In Britain at least, that changed in the mid-80s. TV into the night, BBC Daytime from 1986. To keep people sedated when unemployment went up under Thatcher. Who needs a job when you've got Music Box?

home comforts

(but stops you growing up)

In the 1970s and before that, if you were 19 and didn't go to college, you were considered odd if you still lived at home.

True, in those days it was easier to move out. Renting was cheaper and fairer.

If you didn't misbehave, landlords couldn't throw you out before the end of your contract. No such thing as no-fault evictions, which ought to be illegal. So you had security of tenure, often on a long lease because people wanted their properties occupied.

And rents were controlled - which didn't stop landlords letting out. London in the 70s had a lot more rental properties than now.

And there's this. Young people wanted to move out. Why would you want to carry on staying with your parents. Just too creepy.

Completely different in Italy, where mine came from. Men were notorious mummy's boys over there. Forgive me while I make a detour. I'll be back in Britain soon.

In 1975, during my wrong-headed stay in Rome, I couldn't spend evenings with guys of my own age - because they had to be home by eight, for dinner with their mummies. Trust me, that was the fucking norm.

While students over here were leaving home at 21 or 22, in Italy you could pause your studies and not finish a degree till you were thirty or thereabouts. Naturally you spend all those years at home. You probably didn't leave till you got engaged. Women were having to marry someone who hadn't learned to fend for himself, men who traded in one mum for another. And still went back for dinner with the old one

This must still be still going on. Even if attitudes have changed, I presume it's harder to find a place to live. It was certainly happening in the 90s. Take someone I know. Someone eventually did.

                                                                   *

He was my cousin's nephew, Always a good looking boy, from when we first met in 1969. I was fourteen, he was eight and better than me at football. We'd argue about the odd thing but generally got on, considering the age gap.

Things started going wrong when he hit his thirties. After deigning to graduate at last, he

found there were no jobs because he'd had no work experience!

What saved him was a good brain - and the italian way of doing things for themselves. All those changes of government make them self-reliant, and if you have to bend the odd rule...

He was 35 when he sat another set of exams. And he passed. His first ever job, at that age, with no CV at all? Head of the area's traffic police! Commandant, no less. Boss of the entire traffic division. I called him capo after that.

His uncle was the family fixer, so I knew he had something to do with it. How did him get that job? Tell the truth.

Well, he passed the exams.

And?

What do you mean and?

And?

And...we gave the mayor a present...

I knew it. Don Stefano!

Here's a fun irony, something you couldn't invent. The new commander of the traffic police: guess who he gave his first speeding ticket to. Yup, his nice uncle Stef, who got him the job in the first place! Stefano went round to his office to splutter his indignation.

Now, zio, you wouldn't want me to show favouritism, would you?

Trust me, I would. I really would. Porca madonna.

As well as the job, the new police chief found a wife. Years younger than him, smiley and positive, just what he needed. No surprise to me that he named their daughter after himself.

                                                                   *

For years, decades, it wasn't like that here in Britain. Now, though, it's probably the norm.

School leavers, even university graduates, can't afford their own places, so they stay at home. House prices being what they are, what can you expect, poor things?

Well, try this. Sounds old school, but logical to me. Who says you have to buy straight away? Fucking rent.

We can't afford that either.

Yes you can. If you set your sights lower.

Assuming you find a job, you can afford to live somewhere. Maybe not on your own to start with, but you can do it. My first place in London was a bedsit for twelve quid a week, then I shared that basement dump with Pat and Harry for a lot less. We were on good salaries but didn't mind slumming it to begin with. Not sure kids feel the same today.

A mate of mine did. Twenty years younger than me, and his first job was as a pool attendant, therefore not highly paid. But he got together with some mates of his and they rented a rundown house on the Lower Richmond Road. Lived like squatters when they were young enough not to mind, then moved on, like millions before them.

All because they wanted to leave home. Apart from anything else, they wanted to get laid.

Contrast that years later with another friend of mine, whose son probably still lives with him. When his grandma died, he suggested his parents should give him her apartment! In all fucking seriousness. Just hand over the keys. Even at college, he used to take his washing home.

There's a lot like him in the 2020s. You get grandparents going into debt to help out.

Seems to me kids stay with their mums longer because they don't want to struggle financially, work their way up. They want the comforts of home immediately. But they also like being at home more than we did. For a long time now, I've had the impression that parents want to be their children's friends. In my day, they were parents, preparing you to live somewhere else, as an adult. Nowadays I know mums who dread the day their babies fly the nest. That can't be right. Life's not just about your roots; you have to branch out, to grow the fuck up

I'm not being entirely fair. I know about student loans, and I don't want my son to leave home because he actively dislikes me. But I hope he'll want to leave as soon as he finds work. At the time of writing, he's fourteen. Time I stopped peeling his satsumas for him!

                                                                   *

If and when he gets his own home, he'll live like a peasant.

He'll choose to. Because it's what everyone's been doing for years. Especially the rich.

In the Sixties and beyond, working-class people tried to make their homes posher than they were. Wallpaper on the walls, lino on the floors because they couldn't afford carpets. They had a separate dining room, a separate toilet even when they brought it inside, and kept their best china in a cabinet. Then everything turned on its head.

Suddenly it was the done thing to live like you were imitating peasant farmers.

Bare walls, bare floorboards, eating in the kitchen, with pots and pans hanging overhead. You wouldn't want to dine in the kitchen at a restaurant, but it's an ambition to do it at home. Beats me.

Instead of keeping spare toilet rolls in a cupboard, they're on display sometimes, a dozen at a time. Instead of having a shit outside the house, where it belongs, you do it right next to the bathtub.

I'm not saying it was better before (though I still prefer a dining room and a separate toilet). Putting up wallpaper was a pain (my dad let it curl off the wall), and lino looked cheap, though it isn't now.

Maybe this was the italian in me. I found english sitting rooms cluttered and suffocating. Even worse in victorian London with all that flock wallpaper and portraits and fancy vases. I always prefered the minimalist look in Italy, presumably to keep rooms cool in the heat. Painted walls with not much on them, marble instead of lino, ornaments with unfussy lines.

I still don't know why wealthy brits wanted to live like poor italians, and one day they probably won't. Fashions change.

                                                                   *

branded as idiots

As people earned more money in the 70s, they spent some of it on showing how much they earned.

Not just cars, which meant nothing to me, but sportswear, which did. Memory says it started near the end of the decade. People wearing things with logos, which proved they cost more. Me, always marching to a different drummer, I went the other way.

Whenever I bought a Lacoste polo shirt, I removed the crocodile labels. One in the collar, because my skin doesn't like things that scratch - and the little one on the breast.

The ad agency where I worked, people thought I was mad. It defeats the whole point. The point being to show off you're wearing something expensive.

Me, I bought those shirts because they were better material than some (Fred Perry were too rough) and I liked the colours. So I was willing to pay the premium. But I didn't see why I should fork out extra for something then advertise it for free. Lacoste should've been paying me to wear them. You'd think people working in advertising would understand that!

In the 90s, a friend of mine, twenty years younger, changed jobs, a serious upgrade. To celebrate, he bought himself a beanie hat with Diesel in big letters across the front. When I asked why, he said he was earning more and wanted to show people he could afford something with a logo on it.

I knew that before I asked. He knew there as no point pretending otherwise. It's the only possible answer.

I mean, why else would you have Nike written down the length of your leg? You don't wear branded sportswear for the stitching and quality of cloth, you're not a shareholder in the company. So you can only be showing off or keeping up with your mates.

Different if it's a football club shirt. I get that. You support that. Same with a rock band or favourite film star, an environmental cause, places you went on holiday, Che Guevara.

But a sportswear company? A handbag, a brand of luggage? In the early 80s, people started wearing Benetton in huge letters across their chests. They probably wished Armani would go down the same route. My nephew once wore three items of clothing at the same time with The North Face on them.

The companies who manufacture these things, they probably can't believe their luck. That customers can be so gullible and so vulgar - and gullible and vulgar in their hundreds of millions, for decades.

They include my teenage son. When he was nine and ten, he picked original t-shirts on holiday, even when we suggested other ones. They made him stand out, an individual. By the time he was thirteen, I snorted at the amounts he was spending on Nike, but not for long. I'm a lone voice and you can't stop people paying to join this club. They really do find it aspirational. As in sucks.

Me, I've covered up the name on Birkenstock sandals. When I've bought a branded waterproof, I've sewn an Italia patch over the logo, with the four stars for the World Cups we've won. Or a badge with Je suis Charlie - or, yes, Les Milkins. Displaying something to do with me.

If I wear Asics or New Balance, it's because they're good running shoes. There. I've endorsed them in public. Now where's my commission?

                                                                   *

changes in mind

Talk about mental health.

We didn't.

Because it didn't exist.

Not just mental health problems, the whole issue itself. It wasn't a phrase anybody used.

If you were mentally ill in the 70s, they dealt with it by putting you away. Same if you were mentally 'subnormal', especially 'severely subnormal'. These were official descriptions they used, an improvement on 'cretin' and 'morally defective' in the 50s.

If you were any of these things, psychiatrically ill or born 'backward', you were sent to an institution, preferably out of sight. People with Down's or autism or severe epilepsy, or born severely brain-damaged, all in the same place, a system that hadn't changed all that much since the victorians invented lunatic asylums (another technical term at the time).

When they shut down those big mental hospitals, like the one my dad worked in, the right-wing press were up in arms about care in the community. The thought of normal decent people having to live next to psychotic murderers and rapists. Didn't turn out that way, of course, but they knew that. Anything to sell a few more copies.

To save space in those hospitals, if you were depressed they put you on tablets. A lot of people, a lot of them women, on a lot of tablets. In the 60s, while the press (again) were ranting about the youth of their day using recreational drugs, Mick Jagger wrote Mother's little helper about housewives on valium:

Kids are different today, I hear every mother say

Mother needs something today to clam her down

And though she's not really ill

There's a little yellow pill

The finale mentions an overdose. There's some sharp guitar, too.

Doctors still prescribe pills today of course, and the numbers have been going up. Too many are prescribed without consulting patients - 'We are repeating mistakes from the 1970s', when women were given benzodiazepines like diazepam, often for years and 'on staggering doses way beyond the recommended daily amount.'

But things have been getting better.

CBT was still in its infancy over here. If you were mentally ill, doctors were more likely to give you electric shocks and call it therapy. If you were 'subnormal', they might put you to work for low wages in a hospital factory, and call it therapy. Years later, generally speaking, you'd be treated differently. You'd be treated.

A friend of mine had six kids. Three of them were on The Spectrum. Varying degrees of learning and social issues. He was no Labour supporter but couldn't speak highly enough about the help they got from Blair's government.

That ended after 2010, of course. The vulnerable and disabled had their care packages slashed by an austere government and their benefits reduced by private companies. The schizophrenic woman whose body was found after three years: that may have been down to individual careworkers. but you wonder if they were too low on funds of check on everyone.

Thousands of people died of illness and injury after being passed fit for work by the dreaded WCA, which was run by private companies with public money and won't be abolished till 2026. 'Systemic cruelty...one of the greatest social policy failures in modern times.' When one of its victims had a backdated payment sent to him, it paid for his funeral.

Until then, the improvement had been obvious.

Before that, back in the 60s and 70s, women were put on medication because male doctors routinely classed them as neurotic. Or unstable - a word used about my mum when my own mental state was assessed in 1968 (see below). A male doctor, of course. He even called her 'a poor housewife' - even though he knew she'd undergone cancer treatment that didn't work.

In later years, you'd hope women in her situation got council help with the housework instead of written criticism for not being able to use a hoover when she was terminally ill. When the cancer first struck, she was in her very early thirties. It killed her at 40. I don't know how long that doctor lived.

That assessment of mine. A psychiatric evaluation. I was thirteen at the time. The sort of thing that happened to you only if you stepped out of line.

The mental health of schoolkids wasn't an issue. If you'd mentioned the subject to us, we wouldn't have known what you were talking about. Kids didn't have mental health. We had problems, but it wouldn't cross your mind to approach your teachers with those. You were expected to sort it out yourself, even if you were small and weak or unhappy at home.

Can't get on with your classmates, bullied even? Deal with it, it'll make a man of you. What about the girls? Shut up or we'll hit you with bamboo canes and the edge of a ruler.

They'd probably say they could get on with their jobs better in those days. Teaching facts instead of dealing with any unhappiness among their charges.

So you never sought help from anyone in authority. But they came for you if you transgressed. If you got caught shoplifting, like I did in that year '68, and your headmaster expelled people for that, and your dad worked in a mental hospital and was cosy with the doctors there - I caught a perfect storm.

His doctor pals got me into that boarding school after I had to endure some tests and interviews. At the end of those, they recommended me for 'psychiatric treatment...and be seen for psychiatric treatment occasionally.' Jesus. I didn't need that, I needed some pocket money (any pocket money) and parents who weren't splitting up.

Note the last three words. This was his doing.

My fees at Shawshank were paid by the Reading education authority (a red rag to my rich new schoolmates) - because I was 'a maladjusted child.'

Fucking hell.

There was more of that kind of thing, spread over two pages. Apparently my 'petty pilfering is a neurotic reaction' to a difficult family life. No it wasn't, idiot. I nicked stuff because I couldn't afford to buy it. A lot of working class kids did the same. But they weren't all given a psychiatric evaluation and expelled. My dad even put my brother through the same routine - and he was eight! How do you forgive someone for that?

That assessment is still on my medical records, even though I can't see what the fuck it's got to do with me as a grown man. And they slag off my mum while she had cancer. She was too ill to stop my dad sending me away, but at least she escaped him for the last few years of her life.

I tried to have those pages removed from my records, but that's illegal apparently. So it annoys me that I didn't do it myself when I had the chance.

Sometime in the 1990s, I was waiting to see a doctor when the receptionist asked if I'd mind taking my notes through to him. Sitting outside his room, I start looking through them. When I read this letter about me and my mum, I feel a bit humiliated about me and a lot angry for her. I should've folded the fucking thing and taken it home with me (they wouldn't have missed it).

Instead I show it to the doctor and he says don't worry nobody nowadays takes any notice of words like neurotic and unstable.

It mentions my mum's sex drive. Nobody should be reading about that. She's been dead twenty years.

Sorry, I can't destroy it. I can make you a copy if you like.

Great.

My mum's private life is there to be examined by any doctor who feels like it, till the day I die. She was a powerhouse, a genuine life force, who gave her disease a run for it. Leaving her some dignity wouldn't go amiss. Annoys me that I've always been bad at thinking on my feet. I really should've nicked those fucking pages.

                                                                   *

Nowadays, well over 50 years after that letter, kids don't have to commit misdemeanours to get help with mental issues. In our day, pastoral care was something we were told came from God (the good shepherd, 'and we are his sheep') or a creepy priest.

Cut to 2019, and we're choosing a secondary school for our son. I ask all of them, sometimes three teachers in each one, about their attitude to bullying. I didn't want him going through a fraction of what happened to my generation. Every single school claimed zero tolerance on bullying, mental as well as karate chops to the throat (I'll get you back one day, Studzinski!) - and he hasn't suffered any.

Bullying, and the fear of it, traumatised millions of schoolkids in postwar Britain, stunted their learning. Some of us survived, I know others who fell through the cracks. To me, this is the biggest improvement in schools since my day.

The food's a lot worse, though.

                                                                   *

Back in the day, the idea that children could suffer from clinical depression would've been laughed out of the room. School counsellors? What planet are you on.

But it was the same for adults. For many years after I left college, depression had a small D.

You never heard of any famous sportspeople with it. A footballer in a changing room, admitting to mental issues - utterly unthinkable.

Adam Ant was a pop star of the 80s. Nobody knew he'd once had anorexia ('I wasn't attempting to slim. I was attempting to kill myself.'). Years later, after he was diagnosed as bi-polar, his former guitarist was on TV, Marco Pirroni. He said he once asked the Ant how he could feel so low.

You're good looking and the girls like you. You're a star on TV, you make hit records, and you earn a fucking fortune. What have you got to be depressed about?

What we didn't realise, Pirroni added, he wasn't depressed about anything. He was depressed.

Around the same time, I went out with a trinidadian clothes designer who treated me really badly. If we'd known about depression, I'd have seen she was riddled with it.

She'd lived with a man for five years without having sex. Then did the same with another one! Yup, ten years of that, with dozens of one-night stands, her twenties wiped out. I was unusual in lasting five months before dragging myself away

She claimed to despise men - and she didn't need them. The only woman I ever knew who could have orgasms only in a jacuzzi!

Looking back, the signs of depression were there. I spent half my time with her in London taxis because she freaked out on public transport (we had to get off early). In between lashing out at me verbally, she's making plans for our wedding! Attacking an external target, someone who's undamaged, is a classic symptom: trying to bring someone down to your level of self-esteem saves you looking inside yourself at the pain and failures. The bitterness at allowing her life to be taken away by someone else (no, not me).

Who knows? Maybe if she'd been diagnosed as a teenager. But in those days you couldn't even suggest someone might have depression and should seek professional help. It was tantamount to saying they were weak, they should be sectioned. They'd have shouted at you even more.

All those male students at Oxford not getting laid. They used words like frustration and unhappy, or low. But not clinical depression.

Nowadays it's almost the opposite. Treatment's been shredded by this government, but at least depression's something you can openly talk about. Even among kids.

                                                                   *

In my schooldays and way beyond, nobody had heard of ADHD. And you weren't dyslexic, you were just thick. If you were slightly deaf at the back of the class, you didn't listen hard enough. Then they'd hit your arse with bamboo sticks or the back of your hand with the edge of a ruler. No point complaining to your dad: he'd tell the bastard to do it again. Almost unheard-of for a parent to go in and complain about a teacher.

Very different today, and things are weighted much more in pupils' favour.

No caning. A lot less bullying. Many more going on to higher education. Your mental health taken seriously.

We'd never heard the word transgender. If you felt you were a girl trapped in a boy's body, you kept it to yourself, it was way too creepy for normal folk. Thank fuck we didn't have social media, because people with that issue would've been crucified like they are now. I feel lucky it's something I've never had to deal with.

You'll hear some people say it's gone too far the other way. Having to address individuals as 'they', and 'Everyone's on the spectrum now.' But it's got to be better than failing your vulnerable children. Bottom line: you have to keep splashing the cash.

Instead, state schools are victims of deliberate under-investment by ministers who can afford private education for their own spawn. So a Labour government will have to throw serious money at the problem. Thousands of new teachers. Proper pay to keep the ones still there. Proper school meals. Upgraded school buildings, including ventilation systems for when covid strikes again. Proper taxation of the rich.

It's a fuck of an ask, and I don't expect it to happen (the tories usually leave you with assets stripped bare). But if Labour can achieve all that, I honestly think the majority of kids have better chances than in my day. Fucking hope so, because I've got one now!

                                                                   *

breathing space

No need for me to detail the improvements in medicine over the last half-century. It's enough to repeat the ten-year increase in men's life expectancy.

But a couple of things in passing. Two increases. Asthma and the number of allergies.

I asked someone of my generation once. Did he remember anyone with nut allergies when we were young? No, he agreed. But he thought that was because nuts were scarcer. They cost more.

That made sense - but it's not the answer. No-one knows why nut allergies went on to affect something like 2% of all kids in this country and four times as many in China. Before the 1990s, they were almost unheard of.

Same with allergies to other things. The number of children admitted to hospital with anaphylaxis went up sevenfold from 1990 to 2004. We didn't know anyone allergic to peas.

For me, asthma was more personal. Cases seemed to shoot up with that too.

That was just my overall impression, from people's children I met. So I looked it up.

And sure enough numbers rocketed from 1980 to 1994, up by three-quarters since 1980. Something else to blame on Thatcher!

Before then, in the 70s, I knew only one asthmatic, the guy from school who introduced me to Bernie the bass. When he drove us back to Shawshank for a school reunion, he had to leave us out there while he went back to Oxford for his inhaler (surprised he was well enough to drive). Inhalers were a shock to see, like someone had an iron lung. We thought of asthmatics as severely disabled.

By the early 2020s, a million kids were diagnosed with asthma in the UK. But part of me, which will make me sound like a pull-yourself-together old fart, wonders how many actually have it.

My evidence for thinking that? Not much and purely anecdotal. I've seen a couple of boys running about in the street, then being given an inhaler by their mums when they just seemed out of breath like any other active kid. I couldn't hear any wheezing. And I know about wheezing. I still do it occasionally. Because I have got asthma.

I'd had it as a little kid. But I'm glad I didn't remember, otherwise I'd never have done any sport. Instead I did a lot, which is good for your lungs. At the time, asthmatics were treated like leukaemia patients. You were excused PE.

I struggled in things like cross-country (though I was in a school team), where you have to move continuously. Rugby wasn't so bad, with its breaks for scrums and line-outs (again, school teams). But I always described my lungs as not big enough somehow. I felt I could've run harder and longer if I'd been able to get more air in.

From the age of fifteen, I've jogged a fair bit outside school. But one night, in my thirties, I start a nocturnal run, and after a few hundred yards I can't breathe. And I mean at all. I was fit at the time, but suddenly my lungs weren't taking anything in.

Tried again the next night: same thing. Fuck, I thought. Don't tell me I've got asthma or something.

I got tested, and yup. Exercise-induced asthma. I rang my dad about something else. By the way, I've got asthma. In my bloody thirties. Oh, he said, you had it as a kid. He'd been right not to tell me.

They gave me an inhaler, and I used it before each run and it worked. Then, soon, I didn't need it any more. The asthma went back to being dormant. Still is, three decades on.

So I'm probably still on the list of asthmatics in this country. Even though it doesn't affect me. Must be a lot of others in the same situation.

In case there's any misunderstanding, I'm not trivialising the issue. Nearly 5,000 people in this country need hospital treatment for asthma, and I can imagine what it's like for kids who have actual attacks. They're the ones who suffer most from car pollution, and in 2023 Britain had more deaths from lung conditions than anywhere in Europe except Turkey.

Even so, I know some doctors are a bit quick to prescribe inhalers. They're quick to prescribe everything else. I was put on Vitamin D pills when I reached 60, tablets for high blood pressure, diabetes medicine when my blood sugar got too high. I changed my lifestyle and came off all of them.

I mention this in connection with asthma because one of the possible causes is the over-use of antibiotics. Doctors have been prescribing them for the common cold, imagine that. If antibiotics do give some people asthma, your doctor might then issue you with an inhaler you might not need for a disease he or she gave you (my son had one as a little boy even though he wasn't diagnosed with asthma at all!). They say a fifth of an average GP's salary is effectively a commission on drugs.

When I was a boy, adults went to the doctor only if they were seriously ill, maybe a legacy of their parents having to pay for treatment before the NHS. The opposite in recent years. A girlfriend even pushed me into seeing my GP for a sore throat! It might be something more serious, she insisted. It was a sore throat.

drill bit

Lump dentistry in with medicine. Another massive upgrade.

I was unlucky but not as unlucky as the generation before. I was born on a cusp. Between rubbish dentistry and improvements that couldn't do more than repair broken porcelain.

Meanwhile, by the time my dad was in his mid-thirties, maybe a lot earlier, he had no teeth of his own. And he wasn't unusual.

I've said medical treatment cost money. That included your teeth. And not just in prte-war days. The NHS was set up in 1948 by a Labour government. In 1952, under the tories, charges were re-introduced for teeth and specs.

Diet, dentistry, and oral hygene were so poor that most of your gnashers would have to come out at some stage, but you'd be too poor to pay for them all. So you put up with tooth pain all your life. Or you had them all out at once.

Relatives would chip in for your 21st birthday - yes, as young as that - and you'd have everything pulled out and replaced by a complete set of dentures top and bottom. Same with young brides sometimes, as a gift before they got married, so their husbands wouldn't have to pay for dental care! According to my dentist, in the early 90s most people over fifty had a full set of dentures.

I presume you were given general anaesthetic for the full operation. Imagine being a dentist and wrenching out whole rows of teeth with pliers, all that blood.

Once the teeth were out and the dentures in, at least you had no more dental pain for the rest of your life. A pain if they slipped out, but you used a fixative to keep them on your gums. Hard to imagine now, but they were something of a blessing.

One day one of my dad's patients threw his lower set down the toilet!

                                                                   *

That was on Hayling Island, our old holiday destination.

Even when I was very little, I sensed my parents weren't happy together, which meant I wasn't either. Apart from anything else, only one of them ever came on holiday with us.

Every three years till I was fourteen, they'd have saved up enough to take three kids to the part of Italy they came from. Mum the Veneto, Dad a town across the Po from Parma. When he said goodbye to her at Victoria Station on our way to Venice in '66, I remember thinking that's weird, never seen that before. The first time I ever saw them kiss on the lips. They split up a couple of years later.

In between these trips abroad, they couldn't afford the seaside in England - except the one on Hayling. Because that one was free.

Every year, various wards at the mental hospital would take patents down there for a week. Council coffers didn't run to B & Bs, let alone hotels, so we camped. Big communal tents in a big field.

I didn't like that arrangement much. You couldn't escape the smell of damp grass, and the tents were too dark for me. But you shared them with other staff kids, boys in one, girls in another, and talked till midnight.

And we generally had fun. My last holiday there was in 1970, when I was fifteen - but even when we were a lot younger, my dad and the other staff would leave us to our own devices, and we went crabbing in the rockpools just beyond the field, and even saw Puffing Bill when we were very young, the steam train they mothballed after that.

Hayling Island had too many pebble beaches for my liking (beware any place that has a spot called Sandy Point), but we'd go on outings in the coach, driven by a Mr Silver, handsome John, who was in goal when I scored my first goal in a match with nets, and a polish man called Mr Bork whom I thought of as Mr Pork because he was overweight. He even scared me a bit because his face looked angry when in fact he was a sweetie.

Flower of Poland. Pan Zygfryd Bork 1920-1992.

The weather was sunny most of the time, so I was always in shorts. The seats in those coaches were made of that fake leather that sticks to the back of your thighs in hot weather, but I guess they were easy to clean, an important consideration with messy patients and children.

In your packed lunch, you'd get a pork pie, which I could eat only if I was starving, sandwich spread sandwiches, as many oranges as you wanted, and packets of Smiths crisps, plain because that's all there was, with that little bag of salt which you'd sometimes have to bite to open, then you'd get a mouthful of salt while the rest would drop to the bottom of the bag, so the crisps didn't have much flavour. When cheese & onion appeared, and especially salt & vinegar, we were in heaven. Kids can't imagine that today.

Or this. Saving up sweets to take with you on holiday.

If I bought a couple of penny chews, I'd keep one of them in a small bag in the under-stair cupboard, plus assorted other sweets and four jelly cubes from a pack of eight, until I had a small stash. Not a big stash. I couldn't afford a big one. But something. And why? Because we didn't get pocket money on those Hayling holidays.

The only time we were given anything to spend was on the one night out, at the famous fairground there. The three of us got half a crown each, the equivalent of 2½ p in decimal money. That was five sixpences, enough for five different things: two rides, two goes at winning something on a stall, and a bag of chips as you waited for the coach to come and take you back to camp.

Half a crown wasn't a lot even then, and other staff kids got ten shillings, four times as much. And yes I felt it. I was used to having fuck-all pocket money (Mick Carter and me, we'd roam Reading on nothing and still have fun), but I did wonder how our dad could earn so much less than other people's parents. I suspect he just withheld it from us. Maybe he'd had so little as a kid in pre-war Italy that he thought the same should apply to us. I've gone the other way. Even when money's been a bit tight, my own son's had more than his share. And of course I've never hit him, whereas my dad passed down his father's slappings to me.

For a couple of years, going to the fair was particularly special. Because I was with Fiona Cryle.

Her dad was Scottish. He worked as a PT instructor at the hospital and later ran a sportswear shop opposite Reading Station. Fiona was about my age, blond, bright, and nice looking. I couldn't exactly call her my girlfriend because we saw each other only on those holidays and the last one was when I was ten years old! But we spent most of our time together on Hayling Island and I looked forward to that.

The highlight was the night at the fair, when adults let us roam free. Me and my brother and sister were given half a crown each, 12½p. Since everything cost sixpence, we had four rides and a bag of chips at the end. Fiona and her brothers got a lot more, but my dad was always tight with pocket money. The chips tasted good because we rarely had them in Reading. Free batter crackling sprinkled on top.

I tried ringing Fiona in Reading once, but I think I didn't have the right number. She was a highlight for a growing boy. Hope her life turned out well.

Staff and patients at Hayling Island in 1965. Staff kids in the front row, me on the right in the long-sleeved grey shirt, my sister immediately to the left, Fiona Cryle in the white headband the other side of the stumps. My brother’s in pale short sleeves second from the left. It wasn’t the patients who presented any danger. Standing out on the top row, with floppy hair and high forehead, is a member of staff called Raymond Cook, who had his wife murdered!

                                                                   *

What was I talking about, you're wondering.

Oh yeh, improvements in dentistry since the 70s. I do like to take the long way round. You've noticed. But it's a fun ride. You agree.

So: dentistry. And someone chucking my dad's dentures down the toilet.

Nothing too terrible about that, you might think. You just fish them out, sterilise, then pop them back in. Ah, but those toilets. They still haunt me now.

The campsite had no amenities at all. Maybe some running water where they pitched the kitchen tent. But no toilets as we'd recognise them now. Instead we had latrines.

Someone had dug a trench. Above that trench, they'd erected a long wooden shack divided into three or four wooden cubicles, each one with a wooden seat with a hole in it.

You sat on that and crapped into a hole, maybe six feet deep and lined with lime to work on a week's worth of human excrement. The place stank of that. Lime, like ammonia, and shit. I can still smell it now, I really can. We referred to toilets as bogs. These were bogs.

I think I used them only once. After that, for a week at a time, I didn't have a crap at all. If I'm anally retentive, maybe it started there.

That's where one of the mental patients threw my dad's bottom set. Unless someone particularly hated him, it was a prank, done for a laugh. And how we did.

You find out who your friends are in a situation like that. No-one - but no-one - was going to go down there and rescue it! No man hath that amount of love. He had to talk like a gummy pensioner for five days. The perils of false gnashers.

                                                                   *

My generation, the one after his, didn't have those. But although we kept most of our own teeth, we suffered in different ways. Those of you my age: prepare to wince and nod in sympathy. Younger readers: read on and realise how lucky you are.

A father who's had all this teeth pulled out, he's not necessarily going to encourage you to brush yours. So our oral hygiene was a shocker. I even remember popping a gumboil; quite satisfying it was, like squeezing a zit. Even when my teeth had cavities, painful ones, I didn't get them seen to immediately.

That was partly fear of the drill. We weren't always given a painkilling injection beforehand, and my pain threshold is very low. Contrast an ex of mine, who never had any painkillers even in middle age. The pain doesn't linger, she said, and she's right. But I still need a double dose.

Sometimes, if you were lucky, you were given gas. General anaesthetic was bliss. Even the smell of the rubber mask was exciting, because you knew it led to sleep. I remember having a dream once, a playground through a bright golden lens, then waking up pain free.

I've always been cursed with a sweet tooth. But I've had to do without one most of my life. One cavity got so big it was beyond filling, at least in those days. Nowadays they'd have found a way of saving it. Apart from the rotting centre, it was a perfectly healthy tooth, so the dentist had to lean right down to pull it out, like an arm wrestler. The gap's still there. I was fifteen years old. I didn't have another one out for 53 years.

One of my best mates had a front tooth removed before he left primary school. Had to wear one of those plastic plates with a fake tooth on it. Made his money very quickly, so he could afford an impant earlier than most.

Not brushing your teeth wouldn't be so bad if you ate food that didn't attack them. Instead we liked sweets like any other kids - and our dad contributed to the rot. We were never short of Ribena.

This was a real treat, because it was expensive in the shops. But we always got it free. Dad brought it home from the hospital.

That and other things. Especially unlimited packs of very yellow butter (no wonder I took to the unsalted sort in Italy). He wasn't depriving vulnerable mental patients, you understand. There was always a surplus of something. I don't know who kept ordering too much Ribena.

I used a metal ladle to scrape ice off the inside of the freezer compartment, put it in a glass, then poured undiluted Ribena over it, a classic snow cone. Brain freeze but delicious.

Years later, I'd make milk shakes my mate Robin still drools about, with Ribena and bananas. Haven't tasted any better.

My dad grew blackcurrants in the garden, but they were too perfumed for me. Ribena added enough sugar to change the taste. And contribute to generations of tooth decay.

My history's hazy on this, but they may have been the firm who got the government contract during the War, to maintain the population's Vitamin C levels. Why politicians picked blackcurrants, I can't remember. Maybe the drink was useful at the time, but after that...

If Ribena send in their lawyers, I'll refer them to a TV programme way back, which specified their part in tooth decay among very small kids. As late as 2003 the Food Commission was saying it contributed to child obesity.

They tried to deflect public opinion by bringing out something called Ribena Toothkind. I used to work in advertising, and I can't remember anyone coming up with something that cynical. Ribena good for your teeth! In 2005 it was withdrawn from sale after a court case. And in 2017, the Daily Mail quoted research which suggested Ribena posed the same threat to teeth as Coke and Pepsi.

All too late for me.

I'm not blaming Ribena exclusively, of course. Or the makers of other sugary foodstuffs, though I hope they rot (them and their teeth). I blame me too. And my parents up to a point. I should've brushed a lot more often. We didn't have electric toothbrushes, but the normal ones are fine. If you fucking use them.

And we'd never heard of floss. Italians used wooden toothpicks at the dinner table, but they were more for fun than anything.

So here I am, with three teeth missing, one of them covered by a bridge, which had to be replaced when the original one broke. To put in a bridge, you have to file down the tooth on each side of the gap, so they're not whole either. The first missing tooth left a gap, because it's near the back, so no implant for reasons of vanity. The latest one's a bit nearer the front, but losing a tooth gives you less to smile about!

Impossible to even guess the number of fillings over the years. I've had three major abscesses and five root canals. I've got four crowns, two of them still there after forty years, another one that lasted thirty. One of the top front teeth has a slight chip.

The dentist gave me a plaster cast of my teeth. It looks like an Iron Age hill fort with the stakes slipping to one side and a gap in the defences.

Anyone from my era will agree: if there's one thing we could change about our bodies...

The generations who followed us shouldn't have to pay for anything much. Because they shouldn't need any routine treatment at all. Nowadays there's no excuse for not looking after your teeth.

Apart from anything else, they won't want to pay for treatment. For many years now, dentists have been making a loss on every national health patient. No wonder so many practices are turning exclusively private, pricing out everyone who can't afford that. You hear of people pulling out their own teeth, making their own dentures and sticking them to their gums with superglue, overdosing on painkillers. Yet another example of a tory government's cruelty.

Protect yourselves from these horrors, young people. Keep brushing those teeth.

When one of my nephews was a teenager, I'd make him open his mouth so I could sigh at his pristine choppers. He'd groan but like it. When he had his first filling, in his twenties, I gave him some quite serious grief.

My son's fourteen and counting. If he gets a filling while I'm still alive, I'll bite him. With my new NHS false teeth.

                                                                   *

averting our gays

I've mentioned my dad being gay.

This next bit isn't specifically about that. But it's also not a general look at changes in attitude to gay people from the 70s to the present day. You'd hope they've been for the better, that the police raids are things of the past - but what do I know? It's never been part of my daily life and I've never studied the history.

This is just to say that for many of us, maybe the majority, it wasn't a subject that came up very much. Gays weren't that prominent in the media.

Perfectly understandable, given that homosexuality wasn't legalised here till 1967, when my dad was forty and I was twelve. So you generally kept a low profile. Imagine if someone had outed the headmaster at my grammar school. A gay man in charge of a boy's school: fucking hell. Public vilification and four years in jail. Tony Davis captained Berkshire at cricket, practised his square cuts by caning my arse, and expelled me for minor shoplifting, so I ended up at that boarding school. Six years after I left it, the pressure of hiding his sexuality became too much, and he blew his brains out. He must've been tormented by stress, so I should sympathise. But he was a major reason why my adolescence was shit - so I never have.

So being homosexual was a serious matter. If the press intimated you might be, they were accusing you of a crime punishable by imprisonment - so the papers trod carefully. When they didn't, they got sued by Liberace!

That approach seemed to carry on into the 70s, because we weren't made aware of many gays in public life. We noticed them only if you couldn't miss them. If they were openly florid.

The boarding school I was at, they'd send us on cultural outings. Places like the Playhouse in Oxford, which wasn't far away. One night, we'd just seen Alan Badel in Othello (the scene where he collapses raised schoolboy giggles) and the coach wasn't due to take us back for a while, so some of the class decided it was time I had a look at Joyce.

Who's she?

Just come with us.

So we go up Beaumont Street, turn right onto Cornmarket then left down the High Street. Down near Queen's College on the left, there's a burger van. Inside, in a white top, is a stout red-headed man with rather orange skin (I didn't know about sunbeds).

This was Joyce.

I was taken to look at him because he was gay.

That's it. No other reason for the excursion. We stood back from the queue of people buying burgers and just watched him for a minute, then back to the Playhouse.

Have to say I did find him worth a look. I was sixteen at the time, and he was probably the first queen I ever saw (my dad and his pals didn't camp it up when I was around). A couple of years later, when I went to college in the same town, Joyce was still around, though I never saw him serving burgers again.

I always assumed he was nicknamed Joyce because he was effeminate. Instead I've just found out it was his surname, and he'd been famous as Oxford's cross-dressing bus conductor. Flamboyant and courageous, he brightened up people's lives, but stresses got to him, he turned to alcohol, and when he died in 1994 he was living in a hostel in Jericho. I'm glad that when I was taken to have a look, I didn't laugh at him.

Thomas John Joyce. A very brave man.

                                                                   *

Incidentally, in passing, burger vans were the only places in Oxford where you could get anything to eat after midnight. There was one on Beaumont Street, just up from my college. The guy was a middle-aged greek. One night he shares his worldly wisdom with me.

Hey. What you think of this Thatcher?

This was my second year, and she'd just been made leader of the tory party.

I told him I hadn't thought about her much.

He shook his head. I don't like.

Her policies are bad, are they?

No, I don't like.

Why's that?

Well...you want to fuck her?

Uh, no -

There you are, then.

Can't say he was wrong.

                                                                   *

So we went by appearances.

Joyce was camp, so he must've been gay. Danny La Rue, John Inman in Are you being served? We guessed John Curry the ice skater.

But we had no idea about Elton John or Dusty Springfield or even Freddie Mercury. You might think that was just me being naive, but no-one ever said don't you know about Elton? And the press never mentioned it. Queen's name wasn't a clue, and when Freddie did a striptease in a kimono, it was written up as just a performer's flamboyance. People hid in plain sight.

As for Rock Hudson and Dirk Bogarde and the ones who swung both ways - Brando, Olivier, James Dean, Lou Reed - we were astounded when we finally found out.

People in the business would've known, of course. But we were small-town young men with our heads in the clouds and eyes for the girls. In sport too, which I followed closely, you didn't hear anything. Billie Jean King was married, for christsake.

My dad, though, we knew when we were quite young. He had a couple of boyfriends to stay, and one of my girlfriends asked to borrow his cassock for a party!

His main man was Cyril Dodd, a name like an old shipyard worker on Humberside who rolled his own cigarettes, but actually an intelligent acerbic good-looking teacher with glasses who introduced me to the Narnia books.

Took me to London, too. An afternoon when I was twelve or so, on into the evening. A greasy spoon in Soho, which was exciting, tube trains (I was nervous at the top of down escalators. They felt like the big wheel at a fair, and I kept fighting the urge to to sit down!), St Paul's from Hungerford Footbridge at sunset. That's maybe when I knew I'd want to live in Lodnon, not stay in Reading.

When I found out what CS Lewis looked like - a bald middle-aged don with a sweater over his shirt and tie - I couldn't accept it. Cyril Dodd was CS Lewis. Touch of the Jeremy Irons about him..

There were a lot of other gay men working at the mental hospital (years later, I stayed with a couple in Andalucia) - but they'd learned it was safer to be discreet, so the subject hardly crossed our minds. Can't remember mentioning it in all the countless hours I spent with Blond Steve, Bernie Cook, or Robin de Rouen.

For most heteroes, that's the kind of decade it was. Glad to be gay came out (see what I did there?) in 1978.

                                                                   *

Right, then.

Dust my hands off now that I've covered a few things.

Socio-political differences between now and the 70s.

Here's some more. All dead important.

                                                                   *

This is mainly a 60s thing, but it carried over.

Dustmen had to be fitter and stronger and get closer to their raw materials.

Dustbins were metal (we used ours as shields in medieval fights) and therefore heavier. And none of those namby wheelie bins or hydraulic trucks. You had to lift the dustbin bodily and carry it on your shoulder, then heft the refuse into the back. Open refuse, too. No black bags. A smellier job.

                                                                   *

Bonfire night, Guy Fawkes, was more important than Hallowe'en, which was an american thing.

Firework displays were only on Bonfire Night; now they're all year round. But you don't get so many bonfires on November the Fifth. And I prefer that. Even as a boy, I found it creepy to celebrate burning a man alive. Not many kids made their own guy, then sat on pavements hoping someone would toss them the odd coin.

We'd all have preferred knocking on doors to build up a bucket of sweets. The sugar wouldn't have done much more harm: our teeth were already rotten by then!

                                                                   *

Buskers made their own music.

Most of them used acoustic guitars. Easier to grab and run when the cops came looking for you in tube stations. None of those legal pitches you get now; busking was an outlaw activity.

And you had to be quite close to know it was happening. No microphones or backing tracks you can hear at the other end of the high street. Fucking urban blight.

                                                                   *

Very few people had tattoos.

Maybe if you were in the army, or you'd been to jail. Tattoo parlours seemed dangerous and dodgy. I didn't know many people who had one.

There was a guy at the mental hospital where I worked, another ward orderly, name of Dave, a few years older than me. He had the letters L O V E and H A T E on his fingers, and a dotted line across the front of his neck, with the words 'cut here'! His ambition, he said, was to have his whole body tattooed. I've wondered if he got there.

He told us he was having an affair with his auntie. 'Nothing like keeping it in the fambly.' When he made another remark on that general topic, I told him not to worry about me, I could keep my powder dry. We understood each other.

Anyone who had a tattoo had just that. One tattoo. Nothing like the acreage you see now. Footballers, for example.

To me, a male forearm is a fine thing to look at. It's spoiled by a sleeve of tattoos, a Beckham. And you can't help wondering what they're all going to look like in old age, when the skin sags and the illustrations droop on the canvas.

Then you hear that one of the reasons Beckham had so many tattoos is addiction to the pain. And you change the subject.

                                                                   *

Ear rings too. Very few around. Not that many more men wear them now, but you do see a lot more body piercings. Hardly any in the 70s, among women either.

I did think of having an ear ring. Thought it might go with the long black hair, like an italian gypsy. But having the lobe pierced would've been another thing to deal with - like learning to drive or ski. When my wife bought me a neck chain, I stooped wearing it for a while because it got in the way when I washed my neck!

I've always thought men should use makeup. Like I think they should wear bright clothes. When I went to a fancy dress party in Oxford, during second year, Angie Digby and her mate painted dark green shadow under my eyes. Looked good, we all thought. The scary end of glam rock. But again something else to have to bother with.

I’ve hardly ever worn a watch.

                                                                   *

You can't bet people any more.

Before the internet, if two of you had an argument over a fact, you couldn't settle it there and then, and you weren't going to bother going to a library together. So you stuck your hand out.

What's the capital of Bolivia?

La Paz.

No it's not, it's Sucre.

Betcha!

Whoever stuck their hand out more aggressively won the bet. Like raising at poker. You might know the answer or you could be bluffing. If the other person wasn't sure, they backed down.

Nowadays you'll just look it up on the spot.

La Paz and Sucre are both right. Bolivia has two capital cities. South Africa has three. Wanna bet?

                                                                   *

You were allowed to slap your kids.

Encouraged to, even. Spare the rod and all that.

My dad didn't hit me very often (and I was taller than him by twelve), but the threat was always there, so I was scared of him and hated him. That changed when I went to college and he sort of morphed into my grandad, a small timid man who couldn't hurt me any more. But a lot of kids must've lived in fear. Or they were more robust than me and just accepted the beatings.

My mum hit me with a broom one day! But that was just exasperation. The broom snapped on my back and she chased me up the garden for breaking it! Venetian logic. But she was never cruel. And a woman's slap doesn't hurt. A man's does, and you never forget it, though it stays at the back of your mind.

My generation was probably the first to rebel. What our dads did to us, we didn't take it out on our kids.

None of my mates have ever hit their kids. I did once, when he was three! Not as good a story as it sounds. He'd come out of his biting phase, so when he sank his teeth into the webbing of my hand during In the Night Garden, I was more surprised than anything. Hey, I said. What brought that on? You've stopped doing that. He thought it through, waited a minute, then did it again, this time drawing blood. The pain, dear fuck. I pushed the back of his head with my palm and he looked stunned. Apart from that, some normal parental shouting, but no beatings to speak of. A lot of us would've liked the kind of dads we became.

                                                                   *

Comedy, mainstream and otherwise, was often openly racist, sexist, and homophobic. Check out some TV sitcoms and stand-ups. And no-one complained. Audiences liked it. Maybe a lot of them would like it today, if they were allowed to.

                                                                   *

By the 1970s, politicians were less posh than before. Grammar school boys. That started reverting in the 80s (the Iron Witch liked her public school prefects), and look at 'em now.

                                                                   *

It was cheaper to have a kettle or shoe mended and darn a sock than buy new ones.

A lot of people still rented televisions (my dad till he died in 1998).

Most working people never travelled by plane.

You had to be hungry to eat a Mars bar. They were bigger and much heavier.

You couldn't crush a can of coke in your hand.

Only posh people had double-barrelled names.

People sat on the toilet to read a paper.

Schoolchildren were pupils, not students. To be a student, you had to go to college.

Anti-social media was years away. Good. It's shit.

No football club retained the league title between 1959 and 1977.

Spangles (not Spangles Old English) were the best boiled sweets.

Marathon was a better name than Snickers.

In 1970 the world's population was just over 3½ billion. By 2023 it was eight.

Men still wore flares and thought they looked alright.

Porn stars had pubic hair.

A sofa was a settee. Dessert was afters. And woodlice were cheeselogs where we lived. It's a Reading thing.

                                                                   *

People's names were pretty standard.

We heard of americans with surnames as forenames. Forrest, Hunter, Clark, my mate's dad Reed. And if your mum 'n dad were foreign, you might be a Cristiano like me. Or a Jerzy or Leszek. But even we turned into Cris, George, and Leslie.

My irish mate at school was one of eight children. Mick, Patrick, Kevin, John, Mary, Anne, Theresa, Eileen.

And look at the rest of the Milkins band. Bernie, Pat, Harry, Bill.

But no-one calls their kid Graham any more, or Derek, or Denise or Janet.

Instead there are places in the english-speaking world where parents started giving their children unique names, to make them stand out. That obviously matters to some people.

I've been a sportswriter since 1990. I've logged the changes. And I'm about to labour the point, because a) the sheer scale of it interests me, and b) it's what I do.

Take the Bermuda starting line-up in a football match v Cuba in 2019. The forenames: Jahquil, Jaylon, Jahkari, Chikosi, Kacy, Osagi, Lejaun, Tevahn, Cecoy - plus Paul and William! Among the subs: Kesishon, Tomiko, and Razir.

In the early 2020s, international players from Jamaica, St Vincent, and St Kitts included Tahj, Donte, Tahzeiko, Jonte, Camal, Jahvin, Kurtion, Oalex Akeem, Jadiel, Azinho, Kishawn, Chevon, Erel, Renson, Terrason, Java, Oryan, T'Sharne, Ikyjah, Reich, Vaneer, Ordel, Petrez, Dijhron, Tyquan, Kalonji, Gvaune, Kimaree, Nequan, and Tijani. Just a sample.

Girl sprinters from the Caribbean are named Tameka, Sevatheda, Kerron, Kemba, and Schillonie. Similar runners in the USA: Aleia, Twanisha, Talitha, Kaylin, Jaide, and Wadeline.

Tall guys called Shaquille and Usain.

But these things go in cycles. One day we might go back to Duncan, Malcolm, and Norman. Maureen, Gail, and Rita.

                                                                   *

I don't know what names caribbean students had in the 1970s.

Because I can't remember any at Oxford.

Can't picture a single black student. Nor can Patrick ('it's shameful really') or Steve or Martin Neubert.

The only asian student I ever saw was Imran Khan, no less, in the street near Keble. And Benazir Bhutto was president of the Union when she picked another band to be the first to play there. That's about it.

And I'm astounded at how little has changed. In 2015, forty years later, one in three colleges didn't admit any BAME students at all. By 2019, the percentage was 3%. Let's hear Oxford explain that.

                                                                   *

the boys in blue that's really black

Other things also haven't changed much since the 70s. Take the police. Please.

In those days, most police forces probably had a shit reputation. West Midlands were eventually disbanded (see the Birmingham Six below) - but Thames Valley were pretty bad too, where I grew up and studied. They'd pull you in for nothing at all.

I was lucky. Got stopped only the once. In my second year, a sidestreet close to college. For minutes on end, I wouldn't give them my name. Asked why they were questioning me, and they said they didn't need a reason, they stopped hundreds of people. Fucking hell, that's a full-time job. I think it was nothing more than my long hair.

I was there so long a couple of other students came past and listened in, till the plod threatened to arrest them. What for? They didn't need a reason. Eventually I told them who I was just to end the tedium, then wrote a letter of complaint - which I thought took some nerve, because I imagined they might sue me for libel! Or knock on my door in the middle of the night. That's how we thought of the police. Instead I got a written apology, which was a real fucking shock.

Refusing to give my name made me brave and stupid, because if they took you into the cells, you could get a kicking, especially long-haired students. No taped interviews at the time.

They could nick you for anything. And nothing.

I was there when my first girlfriend got arrested for dancing on gravestones. As you did.

Kitty Burton wore a brown hooded cape. Like a hobbit or the killer dwarf in Don't look now. She used to wave it around when the mood took her. Once she stepped out into a line of traffic like a toreador, and one of them was a police car. The guy shouted a bollocking but drove on. Another night, two of them took it further.

It's a summer evening in 1973 and we're walking through St Mary's churchyard in Reading town centre when the bells start up. She's enjoying the rhythm as two police happen to pass by and see her jiving on a slab.

They radio for a car and take us to the nearest nick, where a policewoman strip-searches her for drugs. Kitty wrote a complaint like I did later, but nothing came of it. She got the story in the local paper, with my name in it, and chinese whispers led to people thinking it was me who took drugs instead of neither of us! It's the only photo I ever saw of her.

                                                                   *

I didn't live in London at the time, so I didn't know the Met Police were as bad as any of them.

For most of the Seventies, their commissioner was Robert Mark, later Sir Robert. My main memory of him was after he retired, a rather dull man in a series of adverts for a tyre company ('I'm convinced they're a major contribution to road safety'). They paid him a lot to say that - something like a hundred grand, which was absolutely massive at the time (and remember I worked in the business). But he didn't hang on to it - and as a police chief, fuck did he do a job.

They brought him down from Leicester to clean out the London stables. Apparently he said his plan was to make the Met arrest more criminals than it employed! Nipper Read, for example, took a while to catch the Krays because he couldn't trust most of his fellow officers.

In his five years in London, Mark put fifty police on trial for corruption and sacked another five hundred. And he gave his fee for the adverts to charity. Top man. Lot better than the top woman.

When they appointed Cressida Dick as Met commissioner, I thought someone was taking the piss. She'd been in charge of the operation that murdered Jean Charles de Menezes, so her appointment was a cruel joke on his relatives. And she was shit at the big job.

The first female officer, and the first openly gay one, to lead the country's biggest force, she seemed to have a tin ear towards minorities. When she finally stepped down in 2022, it was because the mayor of London had no confidence she could 'root out the racism, sexism, homophobia, bullying, discrimination and misogyny that still exist'. They still made her a dame. More spittle on the Menezes grave.

                                                                   *

'Twas always thus, though.

Decades ago, thirty innocent people were shot dead by british police in the space of eight years. Not a single conviction, of course. Heaven fucking forbid. In fact, I heard that the officer who blew Menezes's brains out at close range went on to kill another innocent victim.

Later, in 2011, the Tottenham riots that spread over London and other cities stemmed from Mark Duggan being shot dead as he ran away.

On that occasion, the state showed some heartless tendencies. People in court for looting included a teminally-ill cancer patient (the tumours were visible on his face) remanded in custody for picking up a packet of cigarettes from a window smashed by someone else. Another guy was refused bail because his oyster card wasn't registered in his name. Victorian punishment was back and Thatcher was very proud down there.

The year before, 2010, student Alfie Meadows needed emergency brain surgery when he was hit by a baton while protesting peacefully. He needed more than 100 staples in his head. Despite his injuries, the Met prosecuted him three times for 'violent disorder'! That skull of his, attacking defenceless batons. He was acquitted in 2013 but not paid compensation until ten years after that. Naturally police omertà kicked in and the thug who hospitalised Meadows has never been named.

They did put a name to Chris Kaba's killer, but not a face. Martyn Blake's acquittal is a verdict his family can't cope with and I'll never understand. Shot dead because the police worried Kaba might ram one of them to death with his car. At eight miles an hour. After the trial, details of Kaba's criminal past were made public, to show he was a wrong 'un and shooting him was doing us a favour.

Add this to the killings of other unarmed black men - Duggan, Jermaine Baker, Azelle Rodney - and tell me things have improved since the 70s..

Dame Dick was replaced as Met commissioner by Mark Rowley, who came out of retirement. Not a lord - yet - but a sir. In 2022, he estimated that hundreds of serving police officers 'need ejecting', not just the thirty to fifty being sacked every year. Seems nothing's changed in fifty years.

But don't kid yourself that Rowley's another Robert Mark. He was in the Met for years, it's just not plausible that he didn't know what was going on - and he made his pronouncement only when a report came in, and that was made only because a policeman kidnapped, raped, and killed a woman.

The report highlighted institutional racism in the Met (same as in the report on Stephen Lawrence's murder back in 1993). That and misogyny and general corruption. One officer faced eleven claims, including sexual assault, harassment, and domestic abuse, but was still in the force - and in January 2023, David Carrick pleaded guilty to more than 40 sexual assaults spread over 17 years, including 24 rapes and keeping women in a cupboard at home. The Met admitted mistakes in failing to do something about his 'escalating danger'. He was even promoted to an elite armed armed unit.

How many others like him are still on the payroll? Well, just in the six months to April 2022, more than 1500 police officers in Britain were accused of violent offences, including sexual offences, against women. The number of sackings: one percent. One. In the Met, one in every 200 officers had a criminal conviction, all but eight before they joined the force.

How many thousands of others know colleagues guilty of violence against women or racial minorities - and say nothing? The force takes care of its own.

Except some of its own black officers maybe. They're 81% more likely to face misconduct allegations than their white colleagues.

One of the worst things about all this: none of it surprises anybody.

Rowley talked about weeding out officers who 'legitimise sexual violence in ‘banter’; suggest that colleagues are criminal because of their race or religion; display negative attitudes towards people because of their gender/race/religion; use discriminatory and prejudicial language as a form of abuse, e.g. gay or disabled.' Do any of this, he proclaimed, and 'you are not fit to be in the Met'.

But don't expect much to change quickly. A muslim woman, in the force for years, wrote that 'You are never going to completely eradicate racism or sexism within policing.' Too pessimistic? Try this, from Rowley himself in early 2023:

150 police were under investigatiion for sexual misconduct or racsim, along with 'very worrying cases with officers who’ve committed criminality whilst police officers and yet I’m not allowed to sack them. It’s sort of, it’s crazy.' Even when some were removed from the Met, 'other legal bodies, who have a power to reinstate them, did. So I’ve got officers who we determined shouldn’t be police officers and yet I have to keep them. It sounds bizarre – I’m the commissioner, yet I can’t decide who my own workforce is.'

There again, when Louise Casey's 2023 report called the Met institutionally racist, misogynistic, and homophobic, Rowley said he wouldn't use the word 'institutionally'. What instead, then? Systemic, he goes. Oh just fuck off.

Braverman and Sunak also refused to agree the Met was institutionally anything. But you expect that from them.

When Robert Mark took over as commissioner in 1972, he'd never experienced 'blindness, arrogance and prejudice on anything like the scale accepted as routine in the Met.' The Casey Report shows that if anything's changed maybe it's for the worse.

The muslim offcer above, she said people joining the police bring their ideologies with them. Once you give them a badge, they exert power that impacts on colleagues and the public and 'allows them to take advantage of vulnerable people.' It looked like Rowley was going to struggle to change all those mindsets. And where are the safe spaces for whistleblowers? The jury's going to be out for a while.

                                                                   *

Retired police officers from the Seventies. One thing they wish they'd had. Tasers. Oh boy, they'd have enjoyed using those. Their successors enjoy using them now.

They tell us carrying a taser makes them feel safer. I should fucking think so. But a machine-gun would too, and no-one's advocating using - well, not yet.

Face it: if you're given a taser, you can't wait to try it on someone. Those thousands of teachers who hit little kids with sticks. You think they did it with sadness in their eyes? Or people with shotguns in the countryside. They claim they're keeping the pigeon population down, but a couple of barrels isn't gong to kill a flock of five hundred. They fire them for fun.

Same with some police officers in the Met. In late 2022, two of them were jailed for three months after sending each other messages about firearms.

I can't wait to get on guns, says one. So I can shoot some cunt in the face!

Me too, the other one replies. Then he gets into tasers. He wants to use one on a cat and a dog 'to see which reacts better. I think the cat will get more pissed off and the dog will shit. I wanna test this theory. Same with children. Zap zap you little fuckers.'

The first one adds 'downies' to the list. People with Down's Syndrome.

Now. People often don't mean what they write in messages. So they probably weren't serious about shooting someone in the face. A leg would do. But they mean it about tasers. I've been certain of that for years.

Reason they can't wait to use one: you hear the excuse that tasers aren't lethal.

Bit like westerns on TV in the Fifties and Sixties, when you didn't kill a baddie unless he was really bad. Instead the good guys were so accurate they could shoot a gun out of your hand and leave you wringing your wrist, or wing you in the shoulder to disarm but not kill you. You never saw a drop of blood.

Tasers are like that, we're told. They incapaciate you but the effects don't last long.

Yeh, right. Getting hit with fifty thousand watts is a breeze. It only leads to seizures, collapsed lungs, skin burns, and injuries to your eyes, muscles, joints, tendons, and brain. If you're in the police, get a colleague to try one on you, then tell us how it really is.

And tasers can be fatal. Don't know how many people have died, but it's probably in the dozens by now. Our brave police fired one at a guy who'd covered himself in petrol. The taser turned him into a human fireball and he died of his burns.

They've been used on people with mental issues, 'often within hospitals and care homes', and someone having an epileptic fit. When a man threatened to kill himself with a knfife, the police saved him the bother. He died after they tasered him three times. Three!

In 2009 the rules changed so you could use a taser even with no firearms training. Within six years, their use had gone up fivefold. They've been fired at a lot of kids under 18, some under 11 - and of course black people are four times as likely to be on the receiving end.

Not just here. In Australia in 2023, police tasered a 95-year-old woman in a walking frame at a nursing home. You couldn't make this up.

I hate the fucking things. They should never have been introduced. They scare me to death. I wouldn't even want to talk to a police officer carrying one.

That's the point, of course. The police like you to be afraid of them. Stops them being afraid of you.

boys’ toy

I've wondered sometimes. What makes you want to be in the police and end up using a taser? Why would anyone volunteer for firearms duty?

A power trip, simple as that? Many years ago, I saw a playwright on TV discussing something he'd written, about a policeman. He was interested in flawed characters, he said, and it's a flaw to want to police other people.

Not sure it's as simple as that, though there's probably something in it. Me, I've always thought some of them may be in the job so the police can't harm them. I put it a novel: 'You can tell the ones who only joined the police for their own protection.' Better to be inside the tent pissing out.

Maybe some of them really do want to help the community. But tell that to the black schollchildren 11 times more likely than white kids to be searched by the Met. The black couples with small kids stopped and questioned. The international sprinters stopped for carrying a holdall while running for a bus to go training. The relatives of dead firearms victims. The tasered.

Nothing changes if nothing changes.

I've known a number of policemen. One of them said the job turned him into a racist (I had to tell him to stop saying nigger in front of me), though otherwise he was a sweet guy. Another one used to slap his kids, did some boxing, and volunteered for rifle duty. The others were fine but a bit secretive.

They didn't have to tell me it's not always a safe and easy job (two officers were stabbed in London while I was writing this paragraph). But that doesn't excuse what's been going on for decades. And it's not just a few bad apples, it's the whole fucking stall.

                                                                   *

You didn't envy the Met in the Seventies. We all had to live with IRA bombs. I missed two by a day.

One was at the Ideal Home exhibition. It killed only one person but injured eighty-odd and left some without limbs. I was there with the girlfriend the day before. You could understand planting a device at a major show like that - but I also just missed one in the rubbish bin at an obscure bus stop in the East End. Presumably they wanted to show us nowhere was safe. The bombing carried on when I moved to London for work in 1977.

The backlash made a lot of irish people wary of british police. Maybe most irish people. Not just the Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, and Maguire Seven, who had to wait years for their convictions to be quashed.

I don't mean to sound like I'm comparing those days to the Blitz, but it was part of daily life for a while. You got used to looking under seats on a London bus, especially the top deck. That's why we weren't as spooked us some people by the 7/7 suicide bombers.

Incidentally, the number of people on mainland Britain who were born in Ireland has been dropping for decades. When I was a kid, in the Sixties, there were a lot of irish kids in the catholic primary school I went to across the road from our house. My mate Mick was one of eight children. The peak was 1961, a total of 683,000. By 2022, it was less than half that. Replaced by other nationalities, of course.

                                                                   *

So police in the 70s had more irish people to beat up - but fewer students. Since then, numbers have gone through the roof. When I went to Oxford in 1973, I was one of only 5.57% of school leavers at university. In 2021 it was 37.9%. All because 80% of the UK economy is based on services - and to keep the dole figures down.

This is the last main difference I'm going to mention, between life today and me as a young man. The reason I was ever in a band at college. It's all about Money.

                                                                   *

the route of all evil

I don't know if low wages contributed, but in the 70s the british economy regularly grew two or three times faster than the austerity years 2010-22, which admittedly isn't saying much. And here's a big thing: the gap between rich and poor was much much smaller.

Rock stars were forever moaning about having to pay 98% income tax (the Stones moved to France to record Exile). And that figure keeps being bandied around. But it's bollocks. It applied only to the very tip of their earnings. And quite fucking right that the rich should pay extra. Got to be better than having a record 177 billionaires in Britain by 2022. In a country with 3,000 food banks (which, by the way, started having to ration food, imagine that), one billionaire is an obscenity. But a hundred and seventy seven, for fucksake. Plus 2.85 million millionaires (did you know that?). They could have a whip-round to buy some nurses.

Still in 2022, nearly 70,000 of the mega-rich saved a fortune on tax by benefitting from non-dom status, including Sunak's wife. Labour plan to abolish it to pay for training more doctors and nurses.

Not just food banks, with the return of victorian scandals like malnutrition. Clothing banks too, banks for bedding and fuel, even toiletry banks for the three million people in Britain struggling to afford toothpaste, shampoo, toilet rolls, and nappies, which they re-use. Personal hygiene becoming a public health issue. Kids who can't afford to wash being bullied at school, shunned at playtime. Three out of ten girls saying they can't afford period products.

Meanwhe the right wing goes on about growth. The need to prioritise economic advance over living standards. But all over the world, growth has been much slower during the 'neo-liberal' era, i.e. since Thatcher and Reagan. And most of that growth, such as it is, has been overwhelmingly appropriated by the super-rich. We didn't need Biden to tell us trickle-down economics have only ever worked for them.

Take the USA as an example. During the Sixties and early Seventies, the biggest beneficiaries of economic growth were the poorest 20% of the population. From 1975 to 2018, while the merely wealthy turned into serious plutocrats, the poorest 90% of americans lost 47 trillion dollars. Between 1990 and 2020, american billionaires increased their wealth twelvefold.

Similar tales elsewhere, of course, including the UK. In 2022, half the poorest households here had more debts than assets.

So of course yes you should hate and despise Johnson and Truss and Cummings and Sunak and Hunt and Gove and Lord Rees Mogg. The damage they did to the poor and the rule of parliament. And Raab and Williamson and Hancock and Shapps and Dorries and Coffey and Badenoch and Dame Priti Patel, culminating in evil rubbish like Truss and Kwarteng and (fucksake) Braverman. Paid trip to Rwanda, anyone? Cameron and Osborne even more so, for the madness of Brexit and cruelty of Austerity.

But don't forget a list made earlier. Tebbitt and Heseltine and Lawson and Ingham and Bottomley and Lamont and Whitelaw and Major and Widdecombe and Alan Clark and Geoffrey Howe and their unspeakable leader. Because it all started with her.

Like all right-wing rulers, Thatcher profited from an economic crisis.

The problems in the mid-Seventies were far less severe than the one in the early 2020s. But they were enough to breed a set of far-right groups. And they came to power - except not as themselves. Thatcher simply absorbed them when she radicalised her own party. Soon John Pilger was saying Britain didn't have a far-right party because it was already in power. The tories did exactly the same when Farage raised his saddo head.

Once Thatcher was firmly in, the british economy turned into what it is now.

She hated trade unions the most, blaming them for everything from high unemployment to low exports. Even when the economy collapsed and her austerity budget of 1981 led to 11% unemployment, she pushed through two anti-union laws within two years. By the 1983 election, bosses were allowed to sack striking employees and companies that didn't allow unions won government contracts. Special Branch officers spied so closely on union leaders that Tebbit, the employment secretary, knew where they went on holiday! The biggest attack on organised labour since the General Strike of 1926.

Castrating the unions led to a re-regulated labour market. Meanwhile public utilites were privatised to make money for people who already had it. She called it a 'share-owning democracy'. Nice if you can afford it.

When BT was still in public hands, their chairman pleaded for investment from Thatcher, because it had the potential to become world class. But of course that wouldn't have looked good for a right-wing government. Nor would allowing the Royal Mail, a public company doing very well, to float on the Stock Exchange. So Tebbit didn't sanction that either.

Elsewhere, the public were encouraged to borrow, leading to higher levels of personal debt, and not just in the form of mortgages (though the housing market reached a status it never had before).

This came from another area of de-regulation. Banks, freed from lending limits, were only too happy to offer mortgages to right-to-buy council tenants. You were led to believe your own home was a cash cow.

So council properties were sold off and new ones weren't built, leading to the shortage that's been with us ever since. Meanwhile house prices went through the, er, roof - but mainly in the richer parts of the country, which limited the movement of labour and widened the north-south divide. Meanwhile the trade deficit turned chronic.

Remember it was her. She did all this to us.

And you have to hate her more than the Brexit shower. Her and her acolytes. What made them so dangerous is the fact that, unlike Johnson's cronies, they were competent.

They knew what they were doing, and how to, when they dismantled the public sector, privatising even our tapwater (a dissident poster: 'Buy the water you already own'), which led to raw sewage being poured into rivers and beaches. In the 2020s, every single river in the UK was polluted. Look it up. According to the Environment Agency's own data, 86% of outdoor water was 'failing'. Rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, areas of groundwater. Don't expect this to improve under Brexit. Back in 2012, the EU took the UK to court about this - and won.

Naturally the secretary of state for the environment, the unspeakable Coffey, told us the opposite, that 93% of rivers were in good health. By that stage, tory ministers could say what they liked with impunity. They were expected to lie. And the water companies carried on making billions for their shareholders. There were no shareholders in the 1970s. And a lot less polluted water.

While Britain was privatising in the 80s, Norway and other democracies retained control of their water, gas, electricity, and telecoms. And here's an irony. In 2023, some of the UK equivalents were in the hands of state-owned enterprises from other countries!

And look at the privatisations of the railways. More than one, all failures. Private companies running things for profit while prices soared and efficiency went the other way. All fucking predictable. Other countries know capitalism doesn't work with a monopoly heavily dependent on huge investment while providing an essential public service. In 2023, the tory government had to take over a fourth train company in five years. And still they won't nationalise. The opposite in a forthcoming new body.

Other major industries were wrecked. Working docks replaced by dockland fucking apartments. Poverty-related diseases back in Britain. Thatcher probably fancied the return of workhouses.

Her chancellor Lawson hit our economy with a classic capitalist boom-and-bust. Fuelled by the North Sea oil bonanza, his budget in the spring of 1988 was a giveaway for the rich. The top rate of income tax fell from 60% to 40%, the base rate dropped by 2%. Result: a massive spending spree, record trade deficit, and rising inflation. Interest rates shot up to 15% (I remember them too well), home repossessions reached record levels, there were three million on the dole.

Whereas places like Norway used their oil to establish a state-owned wealth fund which benefits its people today (it's the second-richest country on Earth), Lawson squandered the revenue on tax cuts and mortgage relief - i.e. making the well-off better off. And he gave three of his kids his own first name, so he was a twat as well as a cunt.

At the start of he 1970s, this was a country built on manufacturing, nationalised industries, full employment, and strong trade unions. Lawson and his boss turned us into a place ruled by the financial sector, with parts of the state sold off, organised labour weakened, and a widening gap between rich and poor.

We're still living under that model, which is intrinsically unstable, intrinsically unproductive, and intrinsically fucking unfair.

That didn't change after the 2008 crash, which baled out the banks and gave the rest of us the great gift of Austerity Mark Two.

Being a woman got Thatcher a statue inside Parliament (Bomber Harris got one for flattening Dresden and defenceless arab villages) - but she did fuck-all for women in politics. I can remember only one in any of her cabinets. Of the 650 MPs in 1987, only 41 were women, and only one of those was black.

There is no alternative, she said. No such thing as society. Self-interest became the thing, that and the age-old lie that anyone can reach the top. They can't. It's a mathematical impossibility. Millions have to do the jobs the rich depend on. Kids' fairy stories should be about working people, not princesses and kings with untold wealth and absolute power over life and death. Why do you look round a stately home built on the backs of workers who lived in penury? Why do you pay to do that?

Apart from the rich, Thatcher-Reagan never benefitted anyone. Even the middle classes weren't immune. In the Eighties, interest rates hit the level I mentioned above, and Britain's economy didn't grow any more than in the maligned 70s - despite all the billions from North Sea oil. It was just distributed less equally.

Then, come the 90s, average annual growth was the lowest for any postwar decade till then - and the one that followed was even worse. By 2020, growth in  labour productivity was the lowest ever, since the start of the Industrial Revolution!

The best for growth? The 1960s, when the state had more control. A lot of it continued into the Seventies. You won't read that in the Telegraph or Mail.

When the gap widens between rich and poor, resentment grows. And people look for someone to blame. Not the Old Etonians they voted in, not the rich, but easier targets. Abetted by the right-wing press, you get a choice of victims. Asylum seekers, muslims and jews, gays, trade unions, people with darker skins (billions of whom are the same race as whites), even women generally and the whole of the left.

Maybe trade unions more than anyone. Ever since Thatcher, the tory press have been ready for those. Greedy union barons, demanding pay rises the country can't afford. This is 2023, you know. There's 10% inflation.

Well we had high inflation in the late 70s, and trade unions still won pay rises for millions. Nurses, care workers, cleaners, traffic wardens, ambulance drivers, ward orderlies, airline pilots too.

I used to think this was too much and too quick. Maybe I read some right-wing columns. The year 1979, which included the end of the Winter of Discontent, resulted in the loss of 30 million working days, turned the public against the unions, and ushered in Thatcher.

Except it wasn't that simple.

Labour governmnents usually inherit an economic mess and a cracked society. It happened in 1964, and they had work to do for thirteen years after 1997. Expect a similar timeframe if they get back in 2024.

In 1976, they accepted an IMF loan after a run on sterling. The conditions were the usual manacles. Hikes in interest rates, cuts in public spending, wage controls that countered those pay rises.

Tory rulers impose these things because they want to, but it wasn't a good look for Labour. With unemployment up, the Saatchis wera able to lie on their posters. 'Labour isn't working' purported to show a long queue at a dole office. In fact it was peopled with tory activists. I worked in advertisng for six years; I didn't write anything as vile as that.

I watched election night in 1979 knowing it was pretty foregone. The end of the last decade when working people could feel safe.

Forty years later, Truss saw herself as another Thatcher, cutting taxes to speed up growth (that word again), which brings in higher revenues for the treasury, which trickles down to the poor in time.

Bollocks, of course. They neglect to tell you that Thatcher took away with the other hand. When she slashed income tax in 1988, she put up VAT. In 1981, with the country in recession, taxes increased.

And the early years of her reign were a financial nightmare. They're even a point of reference today.

In the three months up to September 2022, manufacturing in Britain fell by 2.3%, the worst performance since the Eighties. Inflation was the worst since 1981. Oh, and home repossessions were up 15%. So much for one of her flagships.

I repeat: remember to trace it all back to the Iron Bitch.

Look at her dates. In 1979, about 13% of british kids lived in relative poverty. By 1992, it was 29%. The percentage declined under Labour, then went back up after 2010. Look at the school meals fiasco Marcus Rashford had to deal with.

I'm no social historian, but I think the UK may have been the first democracy to adopt a 'neo-liberal' economic policy. Note the name, picked to make it sound like freedom from nasty left-wing policies that kept the country in chains.

Thatcher learned the policy from Pinochet, the murdering scum who took Chile by force then tortured and disappeared his own people. America helped, of course. Kissinger: we must protect the Chilean people from their own naivety. That same year, they gave him the Nobel Prize for Peace, on the day irony died.

When Thatcher stepped down as PM, I seem to remember she went on a speaking tour of Chile. She fainted at the lectern once, probably overcome by the presence of her beloved Augusto. Sometimes you hope there is a hell.

She couldn't do a full Pinochet, much as she wanted to. But there are other ways. Anti-union laws and aggressive policing, which our brave bobbies loved (see above). They thought the way they policed Brixton and the miners' strike was the future.

These methods suppressed opposition to neo-lib economics, which led to the the destruction of our manufacturing base, the privatisation of our national assets, the refusal to build new council houses after selling off the originals, the housing boom which priced people out, the credit free-for-all, then the imposition of another crucifying austerity.

Be proud, Margaret.

                                                                   *

They called her Thatcher the Milk Snatcher, when she abolished free milk in schools. Personally I wouldn't have minded that.

There'd be a crate with thirty half-pint bottles by the teacher's desk. You'd drink one in the mid-morning break. Good for you - maybe - but there was nowhere to keep it cool. Particularly horrible in summer terms, when the milk got so warm the cream would pop through the foil lid. You really didn't want to sample that.

There as always a single bottle of orange squash, but that went to some lucky kid who was lactose intolerant, if that even existed. I daydreamed of that bottle on a hot morning.

But school milk showed that someone was taking care. Thinking of our nutrition. We had proper school dinners. Meat and two veg, sitting down with your mates. The puddings were stodge, usually with custard or not enough jam in the rice pudding and tapioca - but they gave you energy.

I was one of the few who liked gypsy tart, which most people haven't heard of. For years, I thought it was served only in Reading schools. Cheap and simple, just condensed milk on a tart base, with a shiny grey-brown surface from the dark sugar. I'd get extra helpings, almost an entire tray, by trading my spring onions, which I hated but everyone else adored, so they were like cigarettes in prison, useful bartering tools. Spring onions were in salad - we had those. No-one liked the beetroot, which stained the mashed potatoes, but again it was good for you. The authorities were looking after us.

Contrast with what goes on now. I can't imagine sit-down meals in schools any more, certainly not my kid's secondary. Mini pizzas and wraps, or biscuits, or nothing at all. I had to email the school when the queues were so long he wasn't getting any lunch. They gave him a special pass, for the head of the queue, an attempt to buy my silence, which worked. I don't like admitting that, but you can't spend your life fighting that system. I'm not Marcus Rashford for Jamie Oliver. When he lost the pass, he sometimes didn't eat again.

School dinners used to be paid for by councils. Now it's private catering companies. The one at my boy's school got thirty quid of government money to spend on each child for a week. Instead the food was worth about a fiver. No wonder their chairman made a fortune. The school didn't address that when I put it to them. Charles Dickens would've recognised their world.

So kids go without food all over the country. And the cunts in charge don't care. It took a footballer - Rashford, aged 22 - to shame the Blond Bastard into extending vouchers through the school holidays. We're talking fifteen quid a week. Shameful that such a small amount makes such a difference to so many people. Like the twenty pounds extra dole money the same government took away.

Those free school meals made an enormous difference to kids like me whose parents lived on subsistence wages (my school uniforms were always second-hand). We didn't know we were lucky, because school meals were a given, you never thought about them. Nowadays - and it's been going on for years - there's hunger in the classroom, which makes kids distressed and disruptive and fucks up their learning because it stops teachers teaching.

Meanwhile the catering companies are making a fortune, like the one at my kid's school in Chislehurst. Maybe the nutrition will trickle down.

                                                                   *

Among Thatcher's natural successors, keeping her bonfires going, step forward George Osborne.

Looking back, the thing about Austerity II isn't just the cruelty. It's how stupid it looks.

If there was ever a time for a government to throw money at its problems, it was the early 2010s. Interest rates couldn't have fallen any further, so borrowing would have been virtually free. The markets were crying out for government spending. That's when you invest in infrastructure and education and training, create shitloads of jobs in green energy before the planet fries -

Instead Osborne chose to slash and burn.

It's true that New Labour had clamped down on 'benefit cheats' by tightening Britain's social security system. But they also took a million British kids out of poverty, even through the financial crash of 2007-08.

In contrast, right at the start of his tenure Cameron announced £11 billion of 'welfare reform saving'. His predecessor as tory leader, Duncan-Smith, gave us universal credit, with its built-in delays that led to unemployed people falling into deep debt, which incidentally hit a third of all disabled people in Britain.

Now add the benefit cap to that. Having small children can make working impossible (check out the cost of childcare) - so parents endure the worst of the cap’s effects. In 2022, 85% of capped families had kids, and 65% of those families had single parents. After paying the rent, they're left with a pittance for anything else.

Now add the bedroom tax. A cut of 14% in your benefit if you had a spare room, 25% if you had two. Supposed to encourage people to move into more 'appropriate' accommodation. Except that only 6% coudl do that, and suffered where they stayed.

It doesn't end there. Add zero-hours contracts, unheard of in the Seventies, which strip away your job security. Then Osborne's benefits freeze, which pushed an extra half a million into poverty. And the two-child policy, when the country needed more homegrown workers in the future. Duncan-Smith again: we need to 'teach parents that children cost money'. It's cunts like you that cost parents money. Tell us how you sleep at night.

Cut this out and keep it as a bookmark: austerity never provides prosperity.

Osborne's baby, despite a classic time to invest. led to negative growth (not slow growth or even no growth, but minus). While incomes rose by 34% in France and 27% in Germany, ours dropped by 2%. The UK did worse than any other country in Europe except Greece and Cyprus. By 2016, our economy was 90% the size of Germany's. Six years later, it was 70%.

By then, Austerity had killed an extra 330,000 people in this country. Confront Osborne with that and I suspect he'd still be unrepentant, while his boss Cameron told us Austerity didn't go far enough. What a total heartless fucker.

He was rich enough to survive it, of course. Same with another tory wretch, Alan Clark, who boasted of spending as much as he could on lunch after a policy meeting about the unemployed - and going on live TV to say he was happy to sell arms to Indonesia so they could massacre East Timorese because he cared more about animals than human beings. He once told a girlfriend of mine that a dog fox had assured him fox-hunting was alright!

It's an indictment of our times that these monsters can say things like that with impounity. Tom Robinson had the right song title for them: Up against the wall.

In the autumn of 2022, the government took another look at austere measures - to offset the £30 billion wasted by Truss and Kwarteng in a matter of days.

But the 'fiscal black hole' isn't hard economic fact. Instead a calculation based on uncertain forecasts and the government's own target for the level of debt in five years time. Not the same as looking at real wages (falling) and unemployment (rising).

And again the timing couldn't have been worse.

The UN's 'rapporteur on extreme poverty' warned that this was precisely the wrong moment to impose cuts on public spending. 'You do not impose austerity measures when the whole population is facing a cost of living crisis. What you do is you raise taxes on the rich, you raise taxes on corporations.'

You impose windfall taxes as a bare minium. Deep into 2022, Shell confessed they hadn't paid any at all, despite record profits of over £32 billion that year. They admitted using a loophole that exempts firms who invest their surplus in more oil and gas extraction.

In the same year, BP declared profits of £23 billion, while Centrica, which owns British Gas, posted £3.3 billion, more than tripling its profits from 2021.

To these people, Net Zero means the number of noughts after a dollar sign.

Let me tell you: this DID NOT HAPPEN in the nationalised industries of the 1970s.

It'll get worse, too. In the two years after 2022, fuel companies in Britain are projected to make £170 billion in excess profits. Less than a third of that would insulate every home in the UK, which has one of the oldest and draughtiest housing stocks in western Europe. One of the worst for ventilation too, not good news on a warming planet.

You can sort that out by taxing our millionaires - not just billionaires, the poor folk on only a few million - tax them an extra 1% for five years and you raise well over £200 billion. And we should've had electric cars seventy years ago.

Bookmark this too: tax cuts for the rich never increase growth. See the decades above, and the chronically low growth brought about by Osborne. In 2022, the head of the CBI pleaded with the government not to repeat those mistakes. Austerity, he said, led to 'very low growth, zero productivity and low investment, right? It wasn’t a successful strategy for growth.'

Instead the richest 10% of households own nearly half the country's wealth. The bottom half own less than a tenth. That's from the Office of National Statistics. In 2010 the number of billionaires in Britain was 29, already an obscene number but about to edge up a bit: by 2022, they numbered 117.

'The difference between very wealthy and less well-off people has become obscene.' A former chairman of Greggs said that.

In this rich country, while George Osborne chairs the British Museum and rakes it in as an investment banker, 14 million live in poverty. People are having to switch off their heating in winter. And we'd never heard of food banks before Cameron.

Be very proud, Margaret.

                                                                   *

All this and we're relatively cushioned in London.

Last time I looked, councils spent five grand a year on each of us, ten times more than in places up north. Instead of another fucking train line to Birmingham, which involves building a third station on Euston Road, Johnson should've been improving rural bus routes in the north and the truly wretched rail network up there.

Levelling up? Spending on the North has fallen since 2019. When Sunak boasted of syphoning money away from deprived urban areas to affluent tory heartlands, at least he was telling a  truth. Honestly he's a cunt.

                                                                   *

The tories wiped out Britain's apprentice schemes, then didn't restore them when the country needed more skilled workers while trade with the EU plummeted by 16%. But no need for me to get started on Brexit. We all know the truth by now. Half of us knew it then.

At least it's done wonders for European solidarity. In early 2023, every EU state reported that support for leaving the Union had tanked, gone through the fucking underfelt. They watched what the british did and said danke but non merci. No more talk of Frexit or Italexit. Thanks for helping us stay together. You morons.

Apart from anything else, I'm not going to get the B word that because there's a limit to how angry I want to be. But you can't help a word about the NHS. Things like the way it's been made to subsidise private hospitals.

Since 1979, the story of the health service is companies being handed government money to privatise a starved public service under our noses. Thousands of people are paying to go private because waiting lists have stretched round the fucking equator.

In 2021, NHS trusts paid half a billion pounds in interest charges to companies for private finance initiatives (PFI). For that, you could've paid the salaries of 15,000 newly qualified nurses. Instead we're 46,000 short (surely a gross under-estimate), plus 5,000 doctors (likewise) and 133,000 NHS jobs in all.

Up to 2010, under Labour governments, spending on health increased every year while waiting times fell.

The complete opposite since then. A&E waiting times have gone up tenfold. This after Brexit legft us with an economy that's £120 billion smaller and the tax intake £40 billion a year less. Tory policies kill: excess deaths are at their highest level in 70 years.

Meanwhile private hospitals don't train any doctors. None. They all come through the NHS. And those hospitals are only in business thanks to subsidies from the taxpayer. During lockdown, Hancock bailed out these places to the tune of two billion - in return for treating on average (are you ready?) eight covid cases a day. For once, words fail me.

But here's a few more on the government's handling of the pandemic.

More than 5,000 italians died in Lombardy (including one of my cousins, watched by another one, a senior nurse) before that cunt Johnson closed the borders over here. Meanwhile he moved unvaccinated old people out of hospital and back into care homes, where they died in their thousands. Amnesty International called their report 'As If Expendable'.

Add that to the excess deaths above for proof that tory policies are murder - while some people make a killing:

A number of private firms were awarded lucrative contracts to provide protective equipment despite no prior experience of making it. Millions of surgical gowns and masks weren't suitable for use in the NHS or simply failed tests. Johnson and his henchmen wasted a fortune on that - and even more on their useless test-and-trace system, which cost the equivalent of one-fifth of the NHS budget in England. I had to check that to be sure I wasn't seeing things. Test and trace made 'no measurable difference' to the impact of the virus, but it lined a few pockets.

Take just a couple of examples from the covid 'fast lane'.

A 'lifestyle company' winning a £25 million contract despite having no published accounts and no apparent background in supplying PPE.

A tory MP advising the government helped a firm secure PPE contracts worth double that - £50 million - after a peer from his own party introduced him to the company.

Another Conservative member of the Lords, Michelle Mone, she and her kids secretly received £29 million from the profits of a PPE company awarded big government contracts after she recommended it to ministers! She admitted lying about it more than once.

If that kind of thing happened in the Seventies, it wasn't reported - so it was never on such a scale or so blatant. They just don't care if people find out. No-one's going to prosecute them, so the worst that can happen is paying some of the money back.

Or not. After a technical inspection, the PPE provided by the company recommended by Mone, which cost taxpayers £122 million, was rejected and never used by the NHS! The government started legal proceedings to get the money back, but I doubt Mone and family were particularly nervous: by the end of 2022, the Department of Health had recouped only £18 million of 'suspect covid contracts potentially worth £630 million.'

Six hundred and thirty million? That can't be right. It's a lot more.

In its annual report, the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial strategy acknowledged that a total of £985 million was likely to be lost to 'fraud and error.' The rich think they can get away with anything. Oh, they can.

By January 2023, the Department of Health had wasted £15 billion on unused PPE, covid tests, and vaccines. Fifteen fucking billion. No wonder they don't want to top up the pay of firefighters and train drivers. They incinerated 1.4 billion items of PPE, including 570 millions aprons and 450 million face masks.

Meanwhile, at the start of the outbreak, the Blond Cunt boasted about shaking hands with covid patients. Call it natural justice when he was hospitalised with the virus, him and Hancock. We all thought the same thought when they recovered.

After refusing to shut the country down, Johnson eased restrictions too early (remember Sunak's 'eat out to help out'?), which sent infections through the roof, leading to longer and more severe lockdowns and thousands of avoidable deaths. Last time I looked, 200,000 had died of coronavirus in Britain, over a million in the USA. How many directly attributable to two men? I've got a percentage in mind. The bodies they let pile up.

I honestly can't imagine this happening under a left-of-centre government, or any government in the 1970s. Rose-tinted specs? Fuck off. I was there both times.

                                                                   *

Want to protest about any of this? Or campaign against petrol companies? Good luck. The Public Order Bill is waiting for you.

I don't mean the people protesting against the monarchy after the queen's death. That woman made billions, paid fuck-all tax, and avoided public scrutiny, yet you can't say a word against her. Those protesters were arrested for holding up pieces of paper, one with nothing written on it! Just what we need: more powers for the police. Naturally they arrested republicans at the king's coronation.

That's bad enough, but I'm talking about glueing yourself to something to stop a bulldozer. It can land you 51 weeks in jail. That's twice the maximum sentence for common assault. Sitting on a road, or obstructing machinery: a year inside. Dig a tunnel and it's three.

There's more. If you've taken part in a protest in the last five years, they can make you wear an electronic tag. Take that off and again it's 51 weeks. And the petrol companies can hit anyone in the country with a civil injunction. Look those up. You won't fucking believe it..

Even if you're brave enough to carry on protesting, watch out for our right-wing press. I've read that the Daily Mail once sent a journalist to infiltrate a group of activists by posing as a volunteer with learning disabilities. Nice people, ay.

And don't bother hoping for legal aide. Cameron slashed that like everything else. The main victims have been the usual tory targets: women, minorities, and low earners. But not millionaires like Boris Johnson, who had his legal bills paid over Partygate.

Want to know what it's like to live in China, Iran, Egypt, Belarus, Hungary, or Putin Land? Soon find out. Apart from anything else, our Bill will encourage those regimes.

Talking of which, you have to hope that one by one they're on their way out. See below.

                                                                   *

Why did the world allow this move to the rich?

Because that's what the world has always done. It's got a lot to do with sheer numbers.

If you sat ten cavemen round a camp fire and one of them said he was going to own 90% of the land and most of the money it made, while the rest did all the work and lived in poverty, the other nine would lynch the mad cunt. It would be unthinkable to live like that.

But multiply those ten by hundreds and thousands and more, and you can't get to the bastards who own everything. The Oklahoma farmer being forced off his land in Grapes of Wrath, he says it for all of us: 'Who can I shoot?'

But in this particular case, maybe there's something else. People simply forgot.

Or they thought enough time had passed. Thirty years was long enough. No need for that never-again feeling.

Time to mention the war.

After 1945, the world wanted to prevent any possible comeback by fascism. And just about everyone in politics agreed that to do that you had to meet people's needs. Food and safety, general quality of life, a right to vote for governments. To achieve that, you needed a robust communal safety net and public services. The NHS, for instance, came into being in 1948.

Until the 80s, O Level social history was a story of unstoppable progress. From the creation of working rights and the right to vote, to a social security safety net.

This all had to be paid for, and until then the rich were doing some of the paying. Top-level tax and inheritance tax had gradually eroded the huge incomes of the rich to pay for a growing welfare state: pensions, benefits, the NHS. The trade unions vilified by the right-wing press were simply trying to maintain that progress in the face of rampant inflation.

That battle was lost, and Thatcher and her ilk stripped those defences away. While the austerity budget of 1981 put millions on the dole, de-regulation of the City allowed top earners to make fortunes - and check out the gap between rich and poor now.

You have to look back at the 70s as a better time. You have to. I lived through them, and I'm living now, so I know.

I couldn't have formed the band in any decade after that. Because I wouldn't have gone to university. My parents couldn't have afforded it.

                                                                   *

My generation, and the one before it, were born into a good time.

The NHS was founded several years before I was born. Just before that, Rab Butler's Education Act provided free schooling for all pupils (a tory, but all due respect). Council houses were built in huge numbers. And the late 60s saw one of the great home secretaries, Labour's Roy Jenkins.

In the space of two years, he abolished capital punishment, legalised homosexuality (see above) and abortion, and made divorce easier. He also removed censorship in the theatre and banned descrimination on grounds of race and gender. A fucking hero. Where are the statues?

Roy Jenkins on TV watches Roy Jenkins on TV. Like a rock band seeing themselves on screen, except this mattered.

                                                                   *

Before him, new universities had opened. And they came with free tuition and grants. So did the older ones. Like the one I went to.

And that's what this entire chapter's about. Thousands of words come down to just two.

student grant

Without it, I couldn't have gone to college. Without the government paying for me, I wouldn't have put a band together. I can feel your relief from here.

It wasn't until my last year at Oxford that my dad earned enough to have to top up the grant. A few hundred quid. Before that, even with mum's wages, it would've been impossible.

If I'd had to take out a student loan, I wouldn't have gone to college. By the time I was offered a place at Oxford, I didn't want to do the schoolwork any more. I was still willing to go there, but not if I'd had to pay for the privilege.

And privileged is the word. For centuries, higher education was denied to millions of working class kids, a lot of them academically brighter than the ones in fee-paying schools. The likes of Labour prime minister Jim Callaghan didn't go to university because his parents couldn't afford it. My generation was one of the first lucky ones.

No such thing as society. Thatcher's phrase. Well maybe that's been true since she got her talons into it. But once upon a time, society did exist. My grant was a proof of that.

Glad I left school then and not when governments went back to pricing out the poor. In the 1970s, a much smaller percentage of school leavers went on to further education. We still had a manufacturing industry, which meant people working in factories, so governments did what they've always done: manipulated the number of kids passing exams.

When factories closed down, many more schoolkids were allowed into college to keep the unemployment figures low - but the powers-that-be didn't want to pay for the extra numbers, so they introduced student fees like America. Dread to think how my own son is going to manage the loan - especially with interest payments, already punitive, going up. Ignore it like everyone else, I imagine. We all live like we're immortal.

But his generation are surely going to have it harder than mine. Young people's earnings are lower and rents higher, whereas triple-lock pensions rise by 10%, including mine, such as it is. By 2023, there were three million pensioners living in millionaire households (I'm not one of them). And two-thirds of all homeowners who reached retirement age have two or more spare rooms, while families struggle to find housing. Again, not guility.

Meanwhile the world is burning, when my generation and others had chances to cool it. But I don't mean us, the people. It's all down to governments and giant petrol companies. You know who invented the phrase 'carbon footprint', to make it sound like we're all equally guilty? BP. It's their fucking fault, not ours.

For all the many reasons above, I'm glad I was young in the 1970s.

Still, even now, you have to spot grounds for optimism.

A planet on fire isn't going to be healed by right-wing demagogues. Bolsonaro was ripping up even more of the Amazon Basin. And by the summer of 1923, far-right parties were surging in Euope.

But as Joe Strummer once had it,

In these days of evil presidentes

Lately one or two

Has fully paid their dues

Bolsonaro's gone (just). So too Trump (in a landslide), and Scott Morrison, and perhaps the same one day in Turkey and Hungary and even India, China, and Russia - maybe even in my lifetime, what's left of it. Last time I looked, Chile's government was the most left-wing since Allende. The Earth needs these green shots.

Over here, only 7% of Conservative voters want a smaller state and lower taxes (fucking vote Labour, then). And young people in the UK are less likely than previous generations to drift to the right as they get older. It's possible the tories are running out of demographic road.

Neo-liberalism seems to have become something of a minority faith, much less popular than the socialism and social democracy it allegedly crushed in the 1980s. When fear of immigration abates, the right-wing governments won't hang on to it for ever.

So there's hope. It's a killer!

Chapter 56. what happened to the unlikely lads