In this blog, I’ve made occasional references to what I call my “Reënactment Project”, which is a long-term ongoing thing I’ve been doing since about 2017. The idea is that every day I make an at least cursory examination of the same day thirty-nine years previously. The reason for choosing thirty-nine years is that for the initial year I planned to do it all the dates were on the same days of the week, meaning that the years concerned were substantially similar. The very basic arithmetic involved is of some interest and I’ll be returning to that later in the post. A side-effect of the thirty-nine year difference is that I am thirty-nine years younger than my father, so he would’ve been the age I am now back then, which focusses me on ageing, life stages and how to stay as young as possible by doing things like addressing my balance through Yoga so it doesn’t deteriorate as fast as it has for him. I can see the end result and know some of the things to avoid, which means that if I do reach his current age I’ll probably have a completely different set of health problems from which my own hopefully not estranged descendants will in turn know what they should avoid. And so on.
My motivation for doing this stems from the disconcerting awareness that we edit our memories, and are also only able to experience things as we are at the time. Also, various media and popular misconceptions lead us to forget and mutate the memories we do believe ourselves to have, and this was particularly important for 1978 as it included the famous Winter Of Discontent, also the Winter Of Discotheque, and I feel we may have been usefully manipulated into seeing this particular season in a particular way to justify everything that came after it. I also want to know how I was as a child and adolescent and pay attention to things which are the seeds of how I am now, and also that which was in me which I didn’t end up expressing. There is of course a bit of a risk here because I’m living in the past and to some extent dwelling upon it, but I do have a life outside this project and find it quite informative and enriching for today’s experiences. However, in general it’s just interesting.
I’ve now reached 1982, and am in the depths of the Falklands War, which was a significant historical event in securing Margaret Thatcher a second parliamentary term. Well, I say “in the depths”. In fact an end to hostilities was announced on 20th June and the Canberra was almost home by 7th July, which is when I’m writing this. I more or less stand by the position I had by the mid-’80s on this subject, which is that Galtieri and Thatcher were both aware that a war would be likely to boost their popularity, although at the time I thought it was an actual conspiracy between them whereas now I just think they were both aware of its expediency. It came as something of a shock to me, a year later, when I realised we didn’t have fixed-term parliaments and therefore the Tories could take advantage of their victory by calling an election whenever they wanted. ‘Shipbuilding’ is redolent of the time:
Although I know Elvis Costello wrote and performed the song, the Robert Wyatt version is the one I associate most closely with the incident. Robert Wyatt was part of the Canterbury Scene and an early member of Soft Machine, so I’m obviously more likely to associate it with him. Just in case you don’t know, Wyatt got drunk and fell out of a window in 1973, paralysing himself from the waist down. Jean Shrimpton, my second cousin once removed, gave him a car and Pink Floyd raised £10 000 for him in a benefit concert. Tommy Vance once described him as “a man who has had more than his share of bad luck in life”.
Another association I make with the Falklands from the time is a play about an Irish barman who was accepted as a member of his community in London until the breakout of the war. He finds himself sandwiched between Irish Republicans and his customers, with racism growing against him which culminates in his murder. This was originally a radio play but later appeared on TV. Although the Troubles were significant and also a spur to creativity, there was a long period during which practically every new play was about them, and it became tedious and annoying. This wasn’t yet the case in ’82 though. There’s also the 1988 BBC TV drama ‘Tumbledown’.
1982 was probably the last year there was really any hope that the previous pattern of alternating Conservative and Labour administrations we were used to would continue into the decade. In fact, this had been a relatively recent development. The first Labour government after the Second World War had been followed by thirteen years of Tory rule, and it was only after that that an alternation of parties in power had begun, lasting only fifteen years. Nonetheless, up until 1982 that’s what most people seemed to expect, and that alternation had held policies and the general timbre of the country in the political centre because the next government could be expected to come along and undo much of what the previous one had done, and so on. This was satirised on the Radio 4 comedy programme ‘Week Ending’ which depicted the future of privatisation and nationalisation as permanently oscillating ad infinitum every five years, which was probably one reason I thought we had fixed terms.
I was communist in ’82, and when I say “communist” I mean Stalinist. I took it seriously enough that I attempted to learn Russian and listened regularly to Radio Moscow, and I was very upset when Leonid Brezhnev died. I was completely convinced that what the Soviet Union was saying about us and themselves was accurate and that the BBC and the like was nothing more than propaganda. I was also very concerned indeed about unemployment, racism and homophobia. I considered being called racist to be the worst insult imaginable, which of course misses the point. I was, however, still a meat eater and was, as you can probably tell, quite naïve. I was also a lovesick teenager in love with the idea of being in love.
However, this isn’t just about 1982 and the events of that year, for me or the world, but also the value of the exercise. It’s often been suggested that I have autistic tendencies and I imagine that this kind of meticulous rerun of the late ’70s and early ’80s is going to come across as confirmatory evidence for that. Clearly people do do things just because they want to and then come up with reasons for doing so to justify themselves to other people. My novel ‘1934’ covers a community where they have chosen to relive the mid-twentieth century over and over again in an endless loop because the leaders think everything has gone to Hell in a handcart ever since, and this would not be a healthy attitude. I made the mistake, a few years ago, of re-reading my diary in a particular way and found myself falling back into the mindset I had at the time in a way which felt distinctly unhealthy. Nonetheless, I consider this activity to be worthwhile because our memories are re-written, and history is written by the winners, in this case the winners of the Falklands War, so our memories are re-written by the winners.
It’s been said that films set in the past usually say more about the time they were made than the period they’re supposed to have happened in. Hence ‘Dazed And Confused’ is really about the 1990s, for example. We generally have a set of preconceptions about a particular period within living memory which turn into a caricature of the time which we find hard to penetrate to reach the reality, and it isn’t the reality in any case because it’s filtered through the preconceptions of the people at the time, even when those people were us. This much is almost too obvious to state. However, there’s also continuity. Time isn’t really neatly parcelled off into years, decades and centuries. People don’t just throw away all their furniture at the end of the decade, or at least they shouldn’t, and buy a whole new lot. We’re all aware of patterns repeating in families down the generations. It isn’t really possible to recapture the past as if it’s preserved in amber. But it is possible to attempt to adopt something like the mindset prevalent at the time, or the Zeitgeist, to think about today, and the older you get the more tempting it is to do so. Since the menopause exists, there must be some value in becoming an elder and sharing the fruits of one’s experience, even when one is in cognitive decline. And of course the clock seems to have been going backwards since 1979, making this year equivalent to 1937. World War II was so 2019.
How, then, does 2021 look from 1982? On a superficial level, it tends to look very slick and well-presented, although airbrushing had a slickness to it too. The graphic at the top of this post is more ’87 than ’82, but it does succeed in capturing the retro-futurism. Progressive politics was losing the fight with conservatism at the time, but the complete rewrite of how we think of ourselves had not yet happened. Nowadays, people are wont to parcel up their identity and activities into marketable units because they have no choice but to do so. The fragmentation there is as significant as the commodification. The kind of unity of experience which existed in terms of the consumption of popular culture back then is gone, although it was gradually disintegrating even then. We were about to get Channel 4 and video recorders were becoming popular among the rich, although they were still insisting that there was no way to get the price below £400 at the time, which is more like £1 400 today. It’s hard to tell, but it certainly feels like the mass media, government and other less definable forces have got better at manipulating public opinion and attitudes. This feels like an “advance” in the technology of rhetoric. However, we may also be slowly emerging from the shadow of the “greed is good” ethic which was descending at the time because we’ve reached the point where most public assets have been sold off and workers’ rights have been eroded that reality tends to intrude a lot more than it used to, and I wonder if people tend to be more aware of the discrepancy between what they’re told and what their experience is. Perhaps the rise in mental health problems is related to this: people are less able to reconcile their reality with the representation of “reality”, and are therefore constantly caught in a double bind.
It isn’t all bad. It’s widely recognised now that homophobia, sexism, racism, ableism and other forms of prejudice are bad for all of us and people seem to be more aware that these are structural problems as well. Veganism is better understood but also very commercialised, taking it away from its meaning. Social ideas which are prevalent among the general public today may have been circulating in academia at the time and their wider influence was yet to be felt. This is probably part of a general trend. There was also a strongly perceived secularisation trend which has in some respects now reversed. The West was in the process of encouraging Afghan fundamentalists and they may also have begun arming Saddam Hussein by this point, although that might’ve come later. CND was in the ascendancy, and the government hadn’t yet got into gear dissing them.
Another distinctive feature of the time was the ascendancy of home microcomputers, although for me this was somewhat in the future. I’ll focus more on my suspicions and distrust here. To me, silicon chips were primarily a way to put people out of work and therefore I didn’t feel able to get wholeheartedly into the IT revolution with a clear conscience. I had, however, learnt BASIC the previous year. I don’t really know what I expected to happen as clearly computers were really getting going and it seemed inevitable. There was also only a rather tenuous connection between a home computer and automation taking place in factories. However, by now the usual cycle of job destruction and creation has indeed ceased to operate, as the work created by automation is nowhere near as much as the work replaced by it, or rather, done by computers or robots in some way. My interest in computers was basically to do with CGI, so the appearance of a ZX81 in my life proved to be rather disappointing.
1982 was also the only year I read OMNI. Although it was interesting, and in fact contained the first publication of ‘Burning Chrome’ that very year, it also came across as very commercialised and quite lightweight to me compared to, for example, ‘New Scientist’. It was also into a fair bit of what would be called “woo” nowadays, and it’s hard to judge but I get the impression that back then psi was more acceptable as a subject of research for science than it is today. This could reflect a number of things, but there are two ways of looking at this trend. One is that a large number of well-designed experiments were conducted which failed to show any significant psi activity. The other is that there is a psychologically-driven tendency towards metaphysical naturalism in the consensus scientific community which has little basis in reason. I would prefer the latter, although the way the subject was presented tended to be anecdotal and far from rigorous. From a neutral perspective, there does seem to be a trend in the West away from belief in the supernatural, and the fact that this was thirty-nine years ago means that trend is discernible on this scale.
Then there’s music, more specifically New Wave. For me, because of my age and generation, New Wave doesn’t even sound like a genre. It’s just “music”. This may not just be me, because it’s so vaguely defined that it seems practically meaningless. It’s certainly easy to point at particular artists and styles as definitely not New Wave though, such as prog rock, ABBA, disco and heavy metal, but I perceive it as having emerged from punk, and in fact American punk just seems to be New Wave to me. It’s also hard for me to distinguish from synth-pop at times. British punk could even be seen as a short-lived offshoot of the genre. By 1982, the apocalyptic atmosphere of pop music around the turn of the decade was practically dead, although I still think there’s a tinge of that in Japan, The Associates and Classix Nouveaux. The New Romantics had been around for a while by then. I disliked them because I perceived them as upper class and vapid. I was of course also into Art Rock, and to some extent world music.
In the visual arts, for me 1982 saw a resurgence in my interest in Dalí, who had interested me from the mid-’70s onward, but this time I was also interested in other surrealists such as Magritte and Ernst, and also to some extent Dada. As with New Romantics, Dalí was a bit of a guilty pleasure as I was aware of his associations with fascism. This was all, of course, nothing to do with what was going on in the art scene of the early ’80s, although I was very interested and felt passionately positively about graffiti. I felt that the destruction of graffiti was tantamount to vandalising a work of art. To be honest, although I’m concerned that people might feel threatened by it and feel a lot of it is rather low-effort and unoriginal, I’m still a fan of it, although I wouldn’t engage in it myself.
1982 was close to the beginning of the cyberpunk æsthetic. I’ve already mentioned William Gibson’s ‘Burning Chrome’, which first appeared in OMNI this month in 1982, and there was also ‘Blade Runner’, which was already being written about, again in OMNI, although it wasn’t released until September. The influence of the genre can be seen in the graphic at the top of this post. To a limited extent even ‘TRON’, from October, was a form of bowdlerised cyberpunk, with the idea of a universe inside a computer. Cyberpunk is dystopian, near-future, can involve body modification, does involve VR and has alienated characters and anarcho-capitalism, with a world dominated by multinationals. ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ had been published, also in OMNI, the year before. The question arises of how much today’s world resembles that imagined by cyberpunk, and to be honest I’d say it does to a considerable extent, and will probably do so increasingly as time goes by.
On a different note, although the days and dates match up between 2021 and 1982, this will only continue until 28th February 2023, after which a leap day for 1984 will throw them out of kilter again. It can almost be guaranteed that years twenty-eight years apart will have the same calendar. One thing which can’t be guaranteed is the date of Good Friday and the other days which are influenced by it. This means that there is almost always a difference between calendars even when the days of the week match up. I also said “almost be guaranteed”. Because the Gregorian calendar skips leap days when they occur in a ’00 year whose century is not divisible by four, we are currently in a lng run of matching twenty-eight year cycles which began in 1900 and will end in 2100. Hence up until 1928 the years of the twentieth century don’t match up on this pattern, and likewise from 2072 onward there will be another disruption of the pattern down into the future. There are also other periods which match between leap days, such as the thirty-nine year one I’m currently exploring, which began last year and includes two complete years as well. This also divides up the years a little oddly, because since I was in full-time school at the time, academic years were also quite important to me, and in fact continued to be so right into the 1990s. This makes a period between 29th February 1980 and the start of September 1980 and will also make a further period between September 1983 and 29th February 1984. Finally, astronomical phenomena don’t line up at all really. Solar and lunar eclipses, and transits of Venus and Mercury, for example, won’t correspond at all.
So anyway, that’s one of the possibly pointless things I do with my time at the moment. It does bring home to me how slowly time does in fact go, because to be honest doing this seems to have slowed the pace of the passage of time back to how it was when I was fourteen or fifteen. What other effects it has on my mind I’m not sure, although I think there must be both positive and negative influences.
A Box Of Chocolates 