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THE
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Changing times
S
top the World – I Want to Get Off! Back in the far-off days of the 1970s there was a vogue for mugs, t-shirts and so on bearing mildly philosophical musings. I’m a Lost Sock in the Laundrette of Life! That sort of thing. I was too young at the time to understand how or why this penchant for wise words evolved, but it was probably a sign of the times. The 1970s, as we’re constantly being told by today’s newspapers, were chaotic. An energy crisis led to high inflation, strikes, etc. On Wimbledon Common a new species evolved to deal with the escalating problem of litter. The Wombles could carry a tune too. What the newspaper headlines suggest is that the 2020s are taking on characteristics of that dreadful decade. The Seventies had Vietnam; we have Ukraine. The Seventies had a major oil crisis; the petrol in my tank is now worth more than the car. The Seventies saw industrial action on a scale not seen since that previous Decade of Doom, the Twenties; we seem to be heading the same way. Inflation is now at its highest since – you guessed it – the Seventies. The way things are going we will soon be seeing young people roaming the streets with shaggy hair and enormous trousers. Netflix and Prime will be switched off and the only source of entertainment for anyone under the age of 30 will be Top of the Pops and Tony Blackburn on Radio One. Wombles will be spotted in the green spaces of south London, and here in Bristol the city council will revive their old plan of paving over the Floating Harbour and turning it into a highway. The Good Life will be returning to our screens… Of course most of the above is unlikely to happen, although I’d be very surprised if boffins aren’t hard at work in a secret lab somewhere, trying to engineer a Womble. One of the many differences between Now and Then is the fact that Then we had a TV programme called Tomorrow’s World, which entertained us with fanciful ideas such as home computers and phones you could carry around in your pocket, and Now these things are real. Human beings live in space. Doctors miniaturise themselves and explore our bodies in tiny submarines – oh hang on, I don’t think that’s happened yet. From the perspective of an older generation one of the frustrating things about contemporary life is that our extraordinary technological advances have failed to solve some of our most deep-seated problems. Today I can enjoy a video call with a friend or colleague anywhere in the world, yet there are people living just down the road from me who don’t have enough to eat. In fact there are proportionally more people living in poverty Now than there were Then. Meanwhile I can buy artisan sourdough bread from several different bakeries… in Bedminster. My mother loves to tell the story of feeding our neighbours’ kids spaghetti in about 1974, and the hilarity that ensued. Previously they had only experienced spaghetti hoops, in tins, and the long strands of pasta – part food, part plaything – filled them with mirth. I wasn’t really old enough at the time to be a good social scientist, but I think that ignorance of the world and its wealth of food was shared by all but the wealthiest or most sophisticated. Since then horizons have expanded massively for many, but shrunk for some, to the extent that people living only a few hundred yards from one another can have unimaginably different lives. This may be our great failure of the past half-century, but let’s not forget our successes. A youngster who took a time machine for a spin back to 1975 would be horrified by the many kinds of prejudice on open display. We could imagine mobile phones, but could we imagine gay marriage? Times do change. ■
10 THE BRISTOL MAGAZINE
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JULY 2022
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No 212
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