The seventies were drab. Just like now.Well in the very early seventies I was a teenager and not affected by political stances – or was I? Doing O levels – German, Russian, and having a history teacher obsessed with teaching us about dictatorships, we covered the lot – from the fall of the Weimar republic right through to Kim il Sung – at the local comprehensive I might add – I refused to go the grammar school cos they wore berets as part of their uniform.By 1972/4 unless you was someone like my grandmother, who in her mid-fifties and had never done a day’s work in her life bar a bit of housework and a bit of baking and knitting, had transport sent to the house to take her to hospital, and was on loads of pills – some of which I nicked – she never missed them – and she had them all - sleeping pills, valium, water tables, laxatives, pain killers, steroids – you name it she had, not that there was that much wrong with her losing a few stone wouldn’t cure – but then the NHS was barely twenty years old and could fritter money away just to show ‘it could’ - could not notice things were on the slide. If you were unfortunate enough to see any news programme there’d be some old, shouty man with a comb-over and another old bloke with a pipe or another old boke with a smirk on his face sailing off to the silly isles or yet another old bloke with a comb-over who scored a goal for some football team. I remember going to work when all the street lights were off – and I lived in Bayswater at the time – and then by summer there was rubbish piled up at each street corner.And still all the news showed was lots of shouty men – some with comb-overs.The seventies were * - which is why there were so many disaffected youth – who expressed what they felt – whether by dress, music, whatever. And then – dull ole Britain got a female prime minister. And by 1980, with two children in tow, I went back to work. And during the 1980s I felt I was rewarded for the work I was doing – well it was certainly shown in my pay packet – because I was good at what I did. These days getting a job is like being a performing sea-lion but once in situ it’s just a tick box exercise as to one’s performance.To me, back then, people like the miners – which is a really horrible job - were just relics of the past and just held the country to ransom with excessive pay demands but now wonder why they didn’t just demand their beloved mine from the government and run it as a co-operative?In hindsight I disagree with some of Thatcher’s policies – like the selling off the utilities – but was greeted with glee by my mother – who was a staunch labour supporter – but that was only because she worked for a gas company and would be getting free share certificates. Or was that just greed?Thatcher dragged this country out of the doldrums – a place it’s gone back to since the turn of the 21st century and given some of the dreck labour let into this country since then I now feel I’m living in the middle ages.
Xanthe West ● 4770d