I have just unearthed this pic from the late 1970s. Short shorts, especially denim ones, with white socks had started to become common as casual wear for young men in the middle 1970s.
Contrary to what young people are taught to think now, the 1970s were a great decade -- certainly the best decade of my life. For most people in the real world the 1970s, not the 1960s as in popular myth, were the decade in which we all had a lot of fun. Young men, gay and straight, were much more attractive both sexually and aesthetically than they are now.
With hindsight it was a golden age, before Mrs Thatcher, and AIDS, came along to spoil everything.
Political upheavals -- Heath's three-day week, Callaghan's winter of discontent (much overblown in the media), the IMF crisis and the supposedly "ungovernable Britain" -- impinged very little on real life, as far as I recall. It gives a completely false view of the reality to look at the decade purely or even mainly in those terms.
Here I am leaning on my trusty old green VW Beetle. I was living in the Pennines and felt that I needed a car because the rail service there was rather sporadic (it is much better nowadays).
I went completely and permanently car-free in 1980 when I moved back to London. Since then I have lived in Luxembourg and Brussels, with some longish stays in Kuala Lumpur, and now London again. At no point did I need a motorcar. In cities, they are just an encumbrance. It still feels marvellous to be liberated from the burden of possessing one.
I wouldn't go around in shorts like this at my age now, but the sad thing is that young men don't do so now either. They would look very much better if they did.
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2 comments:
It makes a better news story to describe Britain as "ungovernable" during the 70s. The examples available to the hacks - the dead piled high in the streets while trying to shop by candlelight for goods ravaged by hyperinflation - are graphic and have some useful photgraphs to splash next to the latest "nostalgia" spacefilling newspaper article.
Never mind that the gravediggers were on strike only briefly and only in one Merseyside borough, or that the rubbish only piled up in Westminister and as the result of a lock-out, or that the powercuts were years earlier and for a different reason or that inflation was as much a feature of the decades either side of the 70s. Never mind all that: what matters is filling space and creating/perpetuating folk memory.
Young people now really do believe that the 70s were a cold, ungovernable, rudderless time. They believe that the people of Britain spent the late sixties wearing paisley whilst off their faces on drugs, the early sixties cowering under tables waiting for The Bomb, the late fifties moving into new council houses and wrecking cinema seats, the early fifties starving whilst waiting for their ration of 3d-worth of pilchards' livers to be delivered... All easy things to hook someone into an article, and all with a grain of truth. But only a grain.
Still, we should be grateful for even getting that tiny grain - it's more than we're usually offered by many journalists today.
Yes, and an important fact about "many journalists today" is that they don't know dick about anything much, having only been born the other day.
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