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Today’s Times is suggesting that getting your Joan Collins on is ‘the ultimate Brexit antidote’. Hah! Not likely. I remember 1973; and as the sort of child who spent a lot of time just watching, who was a precocious reader, devouring newsprint as well as books (and who would read the back of the cornflake packet in the absence of anything better), I remember a lot of things about 1973, some of which could be on their way round again, and the memories and prospects of which just add to the post-referendum gloom.
Things like the three-day week and the power cuts that left us reliant on an oil lamp with a glass chimney for light and the sitting-room coal fire for heat. Cigarette smoke hanging thick in every public venue. Loon pants and men in platform shoes. Crowded, grubby and ancient public transport vehicles: steamy and fuggily redolent of damp wool in the winter; baking hot and dusty-smelling in the summer. The rattling wooden escalators and dim, yellowish light-bulbs of the Tube. IRA bombs at King’s Cross and Euston stations.
And, menacingly resurgent in the last few days, the thing that I had thought would never dare to show its face in public again: racism. The kid whose Dad had been a policeman in Rhodesia and who refused to sit next to a black kid in school. The man in the drapery shop who took down rolls of butterscotch- and chocolate-coloured corduroy and asked how much yardage my mother wanted of the ‘n*gger-brown’. Having it carefully explained to me, with reference to ‘Naught for Your Comfort’, why our family didn’t buy Cape fruit, marked out by its blue-and-white logo with the leaf-shapes above the stalk of the ‘p’. A hand-written sign on a yellowing and dog-eared postcard, displayed behind the glass of a pub door, proclaiming in wonky capitals, “NO DOGS, NO BLACKS, NO IRISH”.
Still, in spite of cringeworthy performances like Cliff singing ‘Power to All Our Friends’, there was good music. This song, an old favourite written in 1973 or early 1974, and sung here by the man who wrote it, may not exactly get the joint jumping, but I’d rather have this drop of authentic feeling from the time, than gallons of newly-distilled, synthetic party spirit.
*****
*****
Who By Fire 
I read that a poll had been done of what Leavers most want to return to about the pre-EEC era, and capital punishment and caning in schools were among them. Both of these things were abolished by Parliament here, without any direction from the EEC or EU (long after joining in the case of caning, and France only formally abolished capital punishment in 1980), although the fact that caning had been abolished decades ago in the rest of Europe was a factor. To be honest, it annoys me to see old fashions casually associated with the pre-EEC era when the two have no connection; there were nice fashions and ridiculous ones before and after, and pleasant and unpleasant music (and musicians) before and after.
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Well, they did have a chronological connection, Matthew. When I think of 1973 (and I can recall it: the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, which took place in March of that year, is the first international news story that I can remember reading about), all these things, and many more besides, are associated with the era: they were what I saw, heard, smelt, and felt as the warp and weft of everyday life.
None of the really good things I can remember from then – like being a kid and having my Dad and grandparents alive – are retrievable by cutting ourselves off from the EU; while some (not all) of the accessible ones are things I wouldn’t want to see back, because they were ugly and embarrassing and deserve to stay decently buried in the 20th century.
Some of them, like dodgy fashions and twee music, are trivially ugly and embarrassing; and some of them, like racism, are soul-rendingly hideous and absolutely mortifying. The Brexit campaign seemed to give permission for a horrifying amount of 1973-style racism to emerge. Certainly not (despite what the Times seemed to be suggesting) something that could be fixed by donning a Joan Collins outfit, downing a Tequila Sunrise or Harvey Wallbanger and bopping to a vinyl single of “Skweeze Me Pleeze Me”.
Whereas Mr. Lowe’s passionate attachment to connection and kindness, and dismay at isolation and hatred, is – in my opinion – a positive in any era.
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