Don't be nostalgic for my youth

My kids are grown adults with lives and families of their own, but they're too young to remember the 1980s, much less the 60s or 70s. For reasons unfathomable to me, they regret this. They tell me that many of their peers feel the same way.

Looking at the state of the world, it's easy to get the impression that our civilization is circling the drain. We are confronted every day by pointless wars, democracies descending into autocracy, increasing unemployment, an inexorable rise in the cost of living, and many other reasons for dismay. My kids seem to look back at the time of my own youth with misty eyes, as if it were a kind of golden age.

It really wasn't.

The 70s and 80s looked a lot different if you had to live through them. Here are a few things that I remember from my youth which, frankly, don't reflect well on British society of the day.

In no particular order...

Building a survival bunker wasn't solely the province of the Doomsday Preppers and their ilk. We all lived with the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. The UK Government distributed pamphlets to all homes, explaining how to make a fallout shelter by taking down the doors between rooms, leaning them against a wall, and piling sand-bags on them. My parents seriously considered digging up the concrete floor of the house to install an underground shelter. People of all ages had the horror of all-out nuclear war on their minds, all the time.

Many people considered it absolutely fine for a woman to earn less than a man, for doing exactly the same work. Some thought women shouldn't even have incomes of their own. Sadly, this included quite a few women.

In fact, women were considered subordinate to men in all areas of life, not only in employment; again, women didn't always object to this. My daughter wants to smash the patriarchy, apparently, but she has no idea how much more patriarchal things used to be. The family home was usually owned exclusively by the father, who could put his wife out on the street if he wanted. It wasn't until the 90s that marital rape was considered a criminal offence.

It was absolutely fine for a person of colour to be paid less than a white person, for doing exactly the same work. We didn't all do the same work, though, because the decently-paid jobs were reserved for white men. Racial slurs were commonplace, even in polite speech. Most people didn't consider racist humour to be offensive. Looking back, it's hard to believe how racist British society was, and how little people cared.

Being known to be gay, transvestite, or transgender made you a target for scorn and, often, for violence. Beatings of gay men were so commonplace that nobody even remarked on them. Even having a gay friend was enough to make you a target. Gangs of drunken youths roamed our city centres on Saturday nights, looking for anybody who looked like he might be a bit queer.

Known child-molesters were allowed, sometimes even encouraged, to work with vulnerable children. Jimmy Saville was a monster, but he wasn't alone. In the 70s we knew such people existed but, for the most part, we considered them pathetic, laughable characters. Even the people who knew about Saville weren't scared of him, and they damned well should have been.

Everybody smoked cigarettes, pretty much everywhere. Even non-smokers kept ash-trays in their homes, because it would have been rude to discourage a visitor from smoking. People smoked around patients' beds in cancer hospitals. It took a catastrophic fire to begin to change our attitudes to smoking. I've heard young people complain that they can't smoke in bars and restaurants these days, but they've never had the experience of being unable to enter these places because the air actually burned your eyes.

Despite our fondness for smoking, we routinely wore flammable clothes, and gave kids flammable toys. We slept on flammable bedding and relaxed on flammable furniture. Most houses didn't have smoke alarms. Unsurprisingly, fatal fires were commonplace.

So, in fact, were deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning: whole families regularly died in a single night, because there was little regulation around gas-fired heating and cooking appliances.

If you wanted to murder somebody, the perfect crime was to run him down in your car, then drink a bottle of whisky while waiting for the police to arrive. Drunk-driving was scarcely even considered a felony: you'd get a fine and a short disqualification from driving at most. We tolerated drunkenness in all sorts of situations where we'd frown upon it today, not just driving. Many professions had a reputation for alcoholism, and sufferers rarely got treatment.

Many diseases that we now regard as survivable were a death sentence. Five-year survival rates for almost all common cancers have doubled since my youth. HIV infection is now eminently treatable. We've almost forgotten what it was like for infants routinely to endure measles and scarlet fever. Polio has been eradicated. Kids in my school class had been born with body parts missing or deformed -- how often do we see that these days? We are hugely more healthy, as a society, then we were fifty years ago.

In my youth, a child who couldn't read by age eight wasn't regarded as dyslexic, but "retarted". In fact, many of what we now regard as specific learning difficulties were just lumped together as mental retardation. A number of my school friends lived with the stigma of being considered delinquent when they were, in fact, autistic or born with an attention-deficit disorder. We simply didn't understand developmental problems very well.

If I wanted to call the emergency services when I was a kid, I had to run to the public telephone in the village. I was a teenager before my parents got their own telephone. At that time, a one-minute long-distance telephone cost about the same as a loaf of bread. Now we can communicate with almost anybody, anywhere on Earth, for at most pennies. Of course, this connectedness has its downsides; but it's a huge benefit for overall health and safety.

It was considered socially acceptable to let your dog shit in the street, in kids' playgrounds, and on the beach. One of my neighbours kept racing pigeons in a coop on his roof; the whole street was often covered in guano. Younger people complain today about the "nanny state", but they didn't have to live in a time when there were few penalties for outrageous anti-social behaviour.

I could go one, but I'm sure you get the message.

Now, I'm not suggesting for a moment that all changes in the last fifty years have been beneficial. Today's cost of housing as a proportion of earnings, for example, is lamentable. We didn't have to endure Donald Trump, thankfully (although we did have Thatcher and Reagan). In the end, though, we have to take the rough with the smooth. The fact that roads are so good in my neighbourhood that the hospital is only a few minutes' drive away -- something that may have saved my life -- follows directly from the fact that there are now ten times as many cars pumping their filth into the air. We didn't build those roads just for ambulances.

As a society, we need to study the past and learn from it. We should do that objectively, and avoid romanticising an era that doesn't merit it.

Published 2026-10-13, updated 2026-10-13

Don't be nostalgic for my youth

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