Sunday 31st January

I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.  Only two month ago at the Autumn Statement our Chancellor stood up and declared that he didn’t actually need to cut Family Tax Credits after all.  There had been denials of a U-turn for weeks and threats to completely emasculate the House of Lords, even Cameron on Andrew Marr had insisted that the cuts would go ahead.  And all the commentators had said it couldn’t be done; that Osborne would really struggle to find the amount he was going to lose (by not cutting) from other cuts.  Well our beaming Chancellor stood up and said that due to revisions by the (supposedly) independent Office for Budget Responsibility he would actually be well into surplus by 2020; that not only would he pay down the deficit but have money to spare – so he didn’t need to make changes to Family Tax Credits at all.  And I was as puzzled as everyone else.  This simply didn’t make sense, but there the head of the OBR was, concurring with Osborne’s confident view of the next four years.

Only a few days later and we got the news that borrowing so far this year was far from improving but was actually much higher than last year, and again commentators were saying that it was highly unlikely that Osborne would even match last year’s borrowing, let alone achieve his own (now made into law) target.  Then we had January.  Stock market volatility, huge China sell-offs, oil prices falling; in fact the North Sea has practically stopped production and of course will pay far less in taxes next year as a consequence.  A couple of days ago Osborne announced that his projected sale of another tranche of Lloyds shares would not go ahead as the share price was too low.  In the last five years the Government has actually made over 20 billion out of sell-offs and there is only Tupperware left in the family’s silver cupboard now.

The final nail in the coffin also came a few days ago – the economy is beginning to slump again.  In the last three months GDP has fallen to an annual rate of only 2%, down from a projected 3% only a few months ago.  And even worse, it is our manufacturing and construction industries that are pulling everything else down; in fact it was only spending in the shops which has been good.  And if you wonder why that might be, you only have to look at the personal indebtedness figures which are now back higher than before the crash of 2008, in other words we are, Government and individuals, all borrowing to even keep ourselves afloat, let alone swimming confidently into a shiny new future.

The actual budget is still a few weeks away, but I cannot see our Chancellor smiling with confidence now.  We will all have to pay now, as there is sure to be lots of trouble ahead.

Saturday 30th January

We often had snow, and even a dusting one Christmas morning but the winter of 1963 was something else.  I was 12 and in my first year at Grammar School and still in short trousers, though as I was so small they came down past my knees, not that that kept my poor legs warm at all.  The snow began early in January.  We were actually visiting Auntie Pam’s house for Sunday tea and the snow came down and down and down.  When it came time to leave we dug out Dad’s Morris Minor but it wouldn’t start at all.  Mum and Dad walked the two or three miles back to our own house and my sister and I stayed at Auntie Pam’s, top and tailing in one large double bed with my three younger girl cousins.  At the time it was really exciting and we were stranded there for a couple of days.

But this winter went on and on, well into March in fact.  There was at least a foot of snow on the ground and far deeper than that when it drifted.  But we went to school every day, chapped legs, sodden shoes and socks and all.  It was so cold that there was a sheet of ice formed from the condensation of my own breath on the inside of my bedroom window each morning.  But our school wasn’t going to let a little bit of snow stop the curriculum – there was no closing of schools for health and safety in those days.  We had to play rugby and football on a snow-covered pitch, even in a blizzard one day when you couldn’t even see more than a few feet in front of you.  We would come in frozen and wet through and through and strip off and run quickly for the communal showers just to get warm.  There was a huge ice slide in the playground and we would take it in turns to run up and launch ourselves onto it, falling over more often than not and finishing on our bottoms.  But no teachers ever thought of stopping us or putting salt down, in fact a couple of the younger ones even had a go themselves and stood around applauding us.

After a few weeks though, the novelty wore off and we were all hoping for a thaw, which was slow coming with fresh falls of snow covering the black slushy ruts along the roads.  I can’t ever remember the roads being cleared or councils gritting the roads, the few cars just slid around on the icy compacted snow.

I have never known a winter like 1963, and definitely don’t want to again; once was enough.

Friday 29th January

Date of log – 20660615

-[Good morning Janek. How are you feeling today?  More rested than at our last meeting I hope?]-

Yes, I am feeling better.  I don’t ache so much now.  By the way, how should I address you?  I mean, do you have a name?

-[I do have a name, of course.  But it is not necessary for you to know that at this time.  Suffice it to say I am your superior.   I have also been assigned to lead this interrogation.  If you wish you may call me William, though that is not necessarily my name.]-

Why the secrecy?  William?

-[I asked you at our last meeting to confine your answers to your own situation.  I will not remind you again, but since you ask; it is not a question of secrecy; it is simply that it is not necessary for you to know my name.  Besides, I would prefer you to think of me as a faceless representative of the security services.  It could just as easily be someone else.  In fact, depending on how these interviews proceed, it may well be another face you are seeing.  The face is unimportant.   The questions would be the same.]-

Okay William.  I am okay with that.  You just don’t seem very Williamy, if you know what I mean.  Does that bother you?  That I don’t really see you as a William?

-[Not at all.  But for the purposes of clarity, let me remind you, that I am the one asking the questions.  I would be obliged if you could confine your answers to statements and not questions.  Now at our last meeting I asked you to use this interval not only to recuperate, but to think about your situation, and to reflect, especially on the motives, the reasons for your little escapade.  I hope you have used your time wisely.]-

I have spent most of the time, ever since and before I first started my little journal, on speculating on my situation.  I used to think I was just self-centred somehow.  Did everyone else sit and think about themselves, and their place in the scheme of things; the nature of life as we are living it here in the second half of the twenty-first century?   Besides, I had no close friends I felt I could discuss this with.  All of my friends were my wife’s friends and were just as fatuous and self-satisfied as she was.  At times they sickened me, but I just went along with it all; it was far easier that way.  But I had no close friends of my own, no-one I felt I could, or even wanted to, talk with.  Especially about our life, or what passes for it here in good old 2066.

-[What about work colleagues, there must have been conversations there, in the rest rooms, pre-pod or after?  Did you not have any close companions there?]-

You should know.  You were observing me all the time.  Weren’t you?  But no, I never really hit it off with anyone at my work.  They are, as I am sure you know, all a bit odd.  Peculiar isn’t quite the word for them, is it?  Sometimes it felt like being in a zoo, along with a load of creatures that walked and talked, but were far from human.  It cannot have escaped your attention that in order to do what we do, to see the slightest deviating patterns in the stream of numbers, which are then passed on to your own hypercoms to investigate, we must have special powers.  That cannot be a common skill.  In order to do that, to be able to discern what even your best computers cannot see, we must be a bit odd. Surely.  And that oddness, that strangeness does not breed camaraderie, but isolation.  Many times I felt I was absolutely alone.  At work, at home, everywhere.

-[So, you never communicated these feelings to anyone at all?  I find that a bit hard to accept.  I can’t quite believe that you never said anything, never spoke to anyone about how you were feeling.]-

Well, not in any specific way.  I am sure that in a vain attempt to liven up the conversation at one of my wife’s boring drinks parties, I may have dropped an occasional bomb or two.  Just to see if any of them weren’t completely brain-dead more than in the hope that anyone might actually share my views.  People moaned, of course, but only about the trivia, the time it took to get raised to another strata, the boringness of their jobs, the shit on TV, that sort of thing.  But no-one I ever spoke to seemed to think there was something fundamentally wrong with the way we were living, with our entire system.

-[And you did?  You felt that the whole ‘new republic’ system, the way that the vast majority of people now had a ‘good’ life, secure employment for all, the eradication of abject poverty, universal health screening, the elimination, at long last, of the vagaries of ‘the market’, in fact the evolution of a much better world for our children to inherit – you felt that this was somehow wrong.]-

Not so much wrong, as soul-less.  Too mechanistic, too controlled and controlling.  No room for personal development, no forum for dissent, or even a slightly different dialect, let alone a new language.  I suppose I felt bored with it all.  The inducement of the next strata level which so obsessed my darling wife meant nothing to me; and as you can see the fear of whatever you may have in store for me hardly scared me either.

Thursday 28th January

We grew up on a council estate and in my naivety I assumed that everyone did, not so unreasonable, we had no television until I was about seven or eight and all the kids at my school came from the same estate.  But this was in the enlightened Fifties when decent homes were built for people to live in.  We lived in a three bedroom semi with a garden front and back and really it was very comfortable, if by today’s standards a bit cold in winter.  We also had a large ‘green’ right outside our front door which became a football pitch in winter where impromptu matches grew out of a couple of kids kicking a ball around.  There was definitely a great communal feeling, almost all the houses were full of young growing families, all struggling to improve their lives.  Money was tight and one of the ways of supplementing incomes was fruit picking.

For a few weeks every summer in the holidays a big flat bed lorry would arrive next to the ‘green’ and the houses would empty as young mums climbed aboard with their kids in tow.  We would be driven out to one of the local farms and the fruit picking would begin.  I say fruit picking, but often it was peas or beans as well as strawberries.  Strawberries were my favourite and Mum would give my sister and I a Tupperware tub full of sugar and we would dip the freshest and ripest strawberries in the sugar then into our greedy mouths.  We also actually helped fill a few punnets too, making sure to only pick the ripe fruit, or the biggest bean or pea pods.  The beans and peas were put into large sacks which I helped haul over to be weighed and your earnings totted up.

Lunch was a bottle of Orange Squash and sandwiches made early that morning, great wodges of cheese between doorstep bread.  In my memory it was always sunny and after lunch all the kids would play games, running around in the warm Suffolk sunshine.  Four O’Clock and we would all climb aboard the lorry and the women would compare their earnings and complain about the muddy ground or the poor crops.  But us kids loved it; I only seem to remember a few years of this and then when my sister started school my Mum got a part-time job and we didn’t need to go fruit picking anymore.

Wednesday 27th January

Noel joined Radio one in the early seventies.  He used to have a two hour show on Sunday mornings.  And he had both an Artist of the Week and an Album of the week.  Looking back, maybe he didn’t actually choose either, but he talked with such enthusiasm and apparent knowledge that he must have at least liked them himself.  And most of these Artists were from America, specifically California.  I had never heard of them, at that time they weren’t mainstream at all.  Noel introduced me to Joni, Neil Young, John Stewart and Jackson Browne and many more– and I rushed out and sought out their records, sometimes very hard to find from a few independent record shops.  He even featured such obscure artists as Judee Sill and Dory Previn, and he loved to tell us who was playing on them; the whole Laurel Canyon session fraternity.  Gradually many of these artists would come over and the Beeb would feature them ‘In Concert’ or later on ‘Sight and Sound’ on BBC 2 too.  So, thanks Noel – who of course soon moved off onto the Breakfast Slot and became bland and famous.  Deal or No Deal?

John Peel was on very late at night and though I wasn’t a regular listener I often tuned in before turning in at night.  He played whatever took his fancy, and his fancy became pretty obscure at times.  But I was always intrigued and it opened my ears to lots of different music including German Electronica such as Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream.  He even played cassette demo’s sent in by new bands who didn’t even have a record out, which in its way may have paved the way for punk. Now, I stopped listening to Peelie when he embraced Punk, which I never really liked that much (I liked the idea but the execution was more often appalling than good).  But I returned to John Peel many times over the years, often just to see what on earth he would play next.  And it made me realise that there is no such thing as bad music, there is just some music I am less familiar with.

Tuesday 26th January

We think we invented convenience, with the internet, 24 hour shopping and microwavable meal but back in the fifties we had our own form of convenience and it was door to door deliveries.

The first I can remember was the milkman, and this was no electric float – this was a horse and cart.  Straight from the farm, the milk unpasteurized, warm and creamy, the farmer’s wife doling milk out of a metal churn with a pint ladle while the horse patiently waited until heading for the next house.  We lived with my Nana and she never had a fridge, she kept her milk in the north-facing pantry on a marble shelf.  And we also had Farmer Clark delivering fresh fruit and vegetables three times a week, all grown in his market garden which we could just see from the top bedroom window.  I was sometimes allowed to hold a crust of bread for the horse as his soft blubbery lips scooped up the bread from my tiny hand.

Then we moved to the new council estate and though it was only a short walk into town we had lots of door to door deliveries.  The milkman, now with his new electric float; fresh bread I seem to remember too being delivered every day.  Weekly we had a hardware van selling all sorts of brooms and dusters, polishes and mops, and a grocery van too I can recall.  But my favourite was the Corona lorry; Cherryade was my favourite, and they had those complicated ceramic stoppers with the big wire clip and the bottles were returnable and you got a penny off for every empty bottle.  There was also the Co-op butcher’s van almost every day; this was practically a social service selling a shilling’s worth of mince or two sausages to old people every day.  In summer there would be lorries selling punnets of strawberries or peas.  And I am probably forgetting some others too, so all in all we were well looked after, only going into town to shop once or twice a week.

Then the Supermarkets opened and people flocked to them; cheap prices and free parking and people loaded up their cars and the door-to-deliveries dropped off one by one, even the milkman is now a rare sight, we buy our milk in 4 pint plastic bottles and the farmers get screwed.   This, by the way, is called progress.

Monday 25th January

I had my transistor radio and used to listen to Radio Luxembourg, but the reception was very poor and the signal used to drift in and out and I was forever trying to fiddle with the tiny dial to get a better signal.  And then the word in the playground was that Radio Caroline was on air, and I soon found it.  It was actually only a few miles away just outside Frinton, right near where I would end up buying my house.  It was completely illegal, the BBC ruled the airwaves, but the signal was brilliant and best of all they played great music all day and all night.  The DJs, now almost all household names, but little more than kids back then seemed to know instinctively what was new and exciting music.  And not only the ‘pop’ charts but album tracks and new singers and groups from America like The Byrds and The Doors and Jefferson Airplane among others.

I can remember excitedly exchanging information behind the bike-sheds at school about this or that fantastic band we had heard.  It was a really exciting time, as the sixties unfolded into psychedelia and the summer of love, new sounds were leapfrogging each other, often led by our very own Beatles or Stones or Kinks or Who or Small Faces or Spencer Davis Group and all the other great bands around.  I used to hang out with the lower Sixth form, a couple of years older than me and they introduced me to Dylan and Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte Marie, music I didn’t know even existed.  And there was also Soul music coming out of Detroit that just blew us away too.  It wasn’t long before there was also Radio London and a few other Pirate ships.  The Government quickly passed laws to outlaw them and threatened to blow them out of the water.  But what really killed the Pirate stations was Radio 1, newly created and by a stroke of brilliance employing most of the DJs from Caroline and London – there was no need for pirate radio now.  Suddenly we had the same great new and exciting music available legally on the BBC.

But I will always fondly remember Caroline, and one time especially when Kenny Everett played ‘Sergeant Pepper’ in its entirety one Saturday afternoon weeks before it would be released.  What a great time to grow up.

Monday 25th January

I had my transistor radio and used to listen to Radio Luxembourg, but the reception was very poor and the signal used to drift in and out and I was forever trying to fiddle with the tiny dial to get a better signal.  And then the word in the playground was that Radio Caroline was on air, and I soon found it.  It was actually only a few miles away just outside Frinton, right near where I would end up buying my house.  The signal was brilliant, but best of all they played great music all day and all night.  The DJs, now almost all household names, but little more than kids back then seemed to know instinctively what was new and exciting music.  And not only the ‘pop’ charts but album tracks and new singers and groups from America like The Byrds and The Doors and Jefferson Airplane among others.

I can remember excitedly exchanging information behind the bike-sheds at school about this or that fantastic band we had heard.  It was a really exciting time, as the sixties unfolded into psychedelia and the summer of love, new sounds were leapfrogging each other, often led by The Beatles or The Stones or The Kinks or The Who or The Small Faces or Spencer Davis Group and all the other great bands around.  I used to hang out with the lower Sixth form, a couple of years older than me and they introduced me Dylan and Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte Marie, music I didn’t know even existed.  It wasn’t long before there was also Radio London and a few other Pirate ships.  The Government quickly passed laws to outlaw them and threatened to blow them out of the water.  But what really killed the Pirate stations was Radio 1, newly created and by a stroke of brilliance employing most of the DJs from Carline and London – there was no need for pirate radio now.  Suddenly we had the same great new and exciting music available legally on the BBC.

But I will always fondly remember Caroline, and one time especially when Kenny Everett played ‘Sergeant Pepper’ in its entirety one Saturday afternoon weeks before it would be released.  What a great time to grow up.

Sunday 24th January

I grew up surrounded by Aunts and Uncles, inundated with them really.  Of course they weren’t all real Aunts and Uncles; many were my mother’s, her mother was one of ten and all of them became my Aunts and Uncles too.  My only real Aunts were Auntie Pam, Mum’s sister and Aunt Anne, my Dad’s Brother’s wife.  But even on my Dad’s side we had Great Aunt Ida and the relatives from Great Yarmouth where Dad’s Dad came from – and they all became Aunts and Uncles too.  On Mum’s side my favourites were Uncle Pow (don’t know how he got the nickname) and Auntie Ruby, who was a perpetual invalid as she was diabetic and Uncle Pow had to give her an injection every day (of course I never witnessed this operation and it was always shrouded in mystery, I imagined Ruby would die in a minute if she didn’t get her injection).  They were what I thought of as Middle Class, definitely a bit posh, even though they too lived in a council house.  My other favourite was Auntie Dorothy and her husband Phillip (who was a ‘linesman for the county’ – though it was far less romantic then Glen Campbell sung about).  Auntie Dorothy had about eight children herself and most of them were girls – Joan, Joyce, Julia, Janice and Jane; imagine the arguments when a letter arrived for Miss J. Duncan.  Their house was often chaotic with various items of female underwear drying in front of the fire which excited a young teenage boy’s imagination.

But in a funny way my favourite Aunt and Uncle were not related in any way at all.  Auntie Betty and Uncle Bob lived out of town in a tiny hamlet called Onehouse and had two adopted children, Rebecca who had a paralysed half of her face and Kim, an olive skinned boy a few years younger than me.  They also had to two large black standard poodles and cats.  Aunt Betty was a great cook and whenever we went for Sunday afternoon tea she would bring out plate after plate of delicious home-made cakes and implore me to eat them, which I would despite my mother’s eye on me warning me not to be greedy.  Uncle Bob made marquetry pictures of various coloured woods and they were both always so welcoming to me and my sister.  Auntie Betty used to line me up with a whole string of customers for bob-a-job week and two years running I collected the most money thanks mainly to Auntie Betty.

I am not so sure if today’s children will grow up in such a warm cloud of Aunts and Uncles.

Sunday 24th January

I grew up surrounded by Aunts and Uncles, inundated with them really.  Of course they weren’t all real Aunts and Uncles; many were my mother’s, her mother was one of ten and all of them became my Aunts and Uncles too.  My only real Aunts were Auntie Pam, Mum’s sister and Aunt Anne, my Dad’s Brother’s wife.  But even on my Dad’s side we had Great Aunt Ida and the relatives from Great Yarmouth where Dad’s Dad came from – and they all became Aunts and Uncles too.  On Mum’s side my favourites were Uncle Pow (don’t know how he got the nickname) and Auntie Ruby, who was a perpetual invalid as she was diabetic and Uncle Pow had to give her an injection every day (of course I never witnessed this operation and it was always shrouded in mystery, I imagined Ruby would die in a minute if she didn’t get her injection).  They were what I thought of as Middle Class, definitely a bit posh, even though they too lived in a council house.  My other favourite was Auntie Dorothy and her husband Phillip (who was a ‘linesman for the county’ – though it was far less romantic then Glen Campbell sung about).  Auntie Dorothy had about eight children herself and most of them were girls – Joan, Joyce, Julia, Janice and Jane; imagine the arguments when a letter arrived for Miss J. Duncan.  Their house was often chaotic with various items of female underwear drying in front of the fire which excited a young teenage boy’s imagination.

But in a funny way my favourite Aunt and Uncle were not related in any way at all.  Auntie Betty and Uncle Bob lived out of town in a tiny hamlet called Onehouse and had two adopted children, Rebecca who had a paralysed half of her face and Kim, an olive skinned boy a few years younger than me.  They also had two large black standard poodles and a few cats.  Aunt Betty was a great cook and whenever we went for Sunday afternoon tea she would bring out plate after plate of delicious home-made cakes and implore me to eat them, which I would despite my mother’s eye on me warning me not to be greedy.  Uncle Bob made marquetry pictures of various coloured woods and they were both always so welcoming to me and my sister.  Auntie Betty used to line me up with a whole string of customers for bob-a-job week and two years running I collected the most money thanks mainly to Auntie Betty.

I am not so sure if today’s children will grow up in such a warm and loving cloud of Aunts and Uncles.