When I was writing the post Ships in the Night last year, it occurred to me that it was quite possible that I or someone I knew might actually be in some of those photos from London in the late 1970s, quite by accident, especially the ones of political protest marches, most of us having been reliable members of the Left's rentamob in those years when it still seemed possible to push back the tide of Thatcherism, simply by shouting at it. However, I could see no familiar faces, not even those ships-in-the-night acquaintances encountered, to quote the dictionary definition, "in a transitory, incidental manner and whose relationship is without lasting significance".
But the main thing that strikes me now on looking at those sets of work is how very different the country of my youth was from the one we inhabit now. The old, weird pre-war Britain was still hanging on in our poorer and more neglected neighbourhoods, and in particular – to pick up a thread from another earlier post – you can't help but notice how different the old were back then, almost a separate species. If you thought I was exaggerating in that post (The New Old) then take a look at those stooped, toothless, pre-NHS ancients in the photographs of Markéta Luskačová, probably not much older than I am now, their backstories already reduced to bric-a-brac on a shabby market stall, remnants of lives cruelly stunted by poverty, limited opportunities, and lived out in the back-to-back terraces and tenements then undergoing demolition.
Things move inexorably on. Incredibly (to me, anyway), two weeks ago I turned seventy-one, and my own youthful years receded yet another click beyond a half-century into the past. A past now as long ago as, say, the 1920s heyday of some 71-year-old bystander watching bemused as I tramped past in 1979, holding up the banner of our Bristol University branch of the public service trade union, NALGO. Back then, it was the old Victorian buildings that were being turned into rubble; now, even the brave new post-war world of a place like Stevenage New Town is feeling its age. The house I was born in, the primary schools I attended, and even the block of flats I lived in during my adolescence have all already been demolished.
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
T.S. Eliot, from East Coker (Four Quartets)
"Ah, it's the being so cheerful as keeps me going, sir!", as Mr. Eliot liked to quip after a few pints, although he would never admit he'd stolen that one off the radio. Odd, really, given the obvious amount of "borrowing" in the lines just quoted, not least from the Byrds (sorry, I'm just being facetious).
But, it's true, though: nothing lasts, does it? Although it can get better. We don't live in a version of the ship of Theseus, where every part gets replaced, exactly as it was, generation after generation. Time may not be on our side, individually, but as a society we have choices over what to replace, what to add, what to remove, and the quality of the components we use. After all, even the worst new-build house (and some are pretty bad) is better than the best Iron Age hut, and is better furnished with heat, light, and appliances than some crumbling ancestral stately home, once state-of-the-art architecture built with no expense spared several hundred years ago.
Although being able to afford to pay the utility bills that fuel your heat, light, and appliances is a different matter; there are always more choices for society to make. For example, should we be putting yet more superfluous cash into a few wealthy pockets, or providing modest comfort for all? You wouldn't think that one would be such a hard choice to make, would you? But, clearly not: yet more superfluous cash flowing into a few absurdly overstuffed pockets it is! True, in return we get Facebook, X, Amazon, Netflix, and the rest of it; fine, if echo-chamber social media, effort-free shopping, and on-tap entertainment are a priority over an equitable redistribution of wealth, as they clearly seem to be. It's "bread and circuses" all the way, but with lots of circus and very little bread. As someone said, as a society we are in danger of amusing ourselves to death.
I read a conspiracy theory somewhere that the goal of a certain secret sub-set of the oligarchic few is, essentially, not just to do away with the need to pay the rest of us to continue generating their obscene wealth, but simply to do away with the rest of us, full stop. Which struck me as ridiculously OTT, until I read in the New Yorker – and you won't find many better sources of fact-checked, responsible reporting – that Elon Musk intends to replace the American equivalent of the Civil Service with AI. Follow that link, and – at the very least – be concerned, be very concerned. Nothing lasts. And things can also get worse, much worse.
But, bad as things might get, I'm afraid my protesting days are pretty much over, reduced to shouting at the radio and the occasional email to my Member of Parliament, Tory though she be (Hi, Caroline!). Any march I might want to join would have to be carefully planned to pass by several public "facilities", and any picket or protest not require too many hours of standing around in the cold. I suppose I am becoming that bemused 71-year-old bystander, whose youthful heyday was more than fifty years ago in a very different world; one where strong trade unions were unconstrained by spiteful anti-labour laws (which, shamefully, no Labour government has seen fit to reverse), and radical left-wing ideas and affiliations were commonplace – almost de rigueur – among the more thoughtful young.
Talking of which, I had a true blast from the past the other day looking through the second-hand books in a local Oxfam shop, where I saw the spine of a 1970s-vintage Oxford University Press paperback of the first volume of Isaac Deutscher's three-volume biography of Trotsky, The Prophet Armed: not something I would ever have expected to encounter on Southampton's Shirley High Street in 2025. Of course, in my student and squatting days it had once seemed that everybody had a copy of that on their improvised brick-and-plank bookshelves. No doubt many of them still do.
Not me, though. I've never owned it, never read it. As I've explained before, in 1973 I was an ignorant, unserious, thrill-seeking aesthete, an introvert trying on extroversion for size (didn't fit, made me look silly), who fell among committed leftists and serious-minded politicos at university. Some of it rubbed off, but I'd have to admit that my own three-volume touchstone in those years would instead have been the first three books by Carlos Castaneda. But I doubt many thoughtful youngsters today are reading either Deutscher on the Russian revolutionary Trotsky or Castaneda on the Mexican brujo Don Juan. So 1970s, boomer... After all, despite the fact that I can state with a high degree of confidence that, unlike Don Juan, Trotsky definitely existed, both he and his ideas must seem increasingly insubstantial from this distance in time to anyone under 30. Nothing lasts, does it? [1]
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