Have you, thanks to Brexit, lost old friends? One upside: that rift will help you deal with the next big split – on accepting the need to become more frugal in our consumption. And if so, how and when to change habits? But, given our addiction to treats, how can we sweeten the pill of curbing …
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On being silenced
When I left Hamburg in June 1982, having already had run-ins with fascist thugs in Bradford (see blogpost 3, What Goes Around), and having since seen a young woman from the Leeds punk scene captured with Hitlergruß on the cover of a pamphlet, [1] I was so terrified by a German neo-Nazi revival that I could not …
On the Perils of Looking West
As the U.K. was forced to shift focus westwards, away from Europe, I returned this summer to America. On venturing across ‘the Pond’, my excitement at seeing New York City was as undiminished as when I was 10. In 1970, at my first Queens elementary school, I was impressed by a poster displaying myriad faces …
A Land of Extremes
As 1975 began, I spied a book on my father’s shelves in his Leeds University office, 1975: The Year of Doom.By now the Oil Crisis had severely constrained resources in Britain; I had realised just how reliant we were on supplies from overseas. When school broke for the Easter holidays that year, I had mixed feelings …
What Goes Around…
Finding myself displaced by organised politics in the mid-1970’s, I happened upon two sources of sustenance. The first was new political theatre, at York Arts Centre. There, my father and I were riveted by electrifying Agitprop productions of workers’ theatre, including 7:84* and women’s theatre, such as Monstrous Regiment** The other comfort was music, especially …
Groundhog Day (Der Tag des Murmeltiers)
As 1969 began, I wondered what the year would bring. Having checked out our neighbourhood, it was clear that our house straddled the class divide. On the opposite side of our street, mothers drove their smartly uniformed children to private primary schools. Our backyard gave on to a terrace of small houses, in which working …
1968:One Girl’s View
In this, my first step into the blogosphere, I sketch a Sixties’ childhood, to the end of 1968. This photograph shows my late parents at a CND march in Liverpool in 1959. Edie, my mother, was pregnant with me at the time. Shortly after this march, Liverpool University sacked my father – after he had …
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