While my life is solidly middle-class now, it wasn’t that way at the start. My first memories are of a flat in Willesden in London: the top half of a small house, my sister and I sharing a bedroom, the main room containing all the kitchen equipment, a table and chairs, a small sofa and a black and white TV. The toilet was in a lean-to in the back garden. We were washed in a plastic bath. I’ve no idea how my parents cleaned themselves.
These were very much working-class circumstances, and a combination of hard work and bloody-mindedness dragged us upwards. But where my father came from was, if anything, below that class demarcation.
I had reason to think of this a couple of weeks ago on a visit to Edinburgh, the city of his birth. We were staying in a Travelodge just off the Royal Mile, which is where he had his first childhood memories. They lived in a basement in Tron Square, which back then was notorious for its squalor and roughness. One memory he has – which he didn’t share until much later in life – was of his mother bringing home a baby from the hospital in a cardboard box. The child was stillborn, and so the box was placed on a dresser. He couldn’t remember what happened to it. And this wasn’t the only sibling he lost in this way.
I was in Edinburgh for the annual trip away with my old friends, where we hang out together and puzzle over how time and change are doing to us what it did to my father
I walked over to have a look at Tron Square while imagining how my father, if he was still alive, might react to it. Now it’s full of bijou bars, hipster shops and a comedy club: unrecognisable from the place he knew. Like his Tron Square never existed. It feels insulting: time and change erasing his history. Not that he would have reacted like that. He would have shrugged it off, concentrated on the present.
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I was in Edinburgh for the annual trip away with my old friends, where we hang out together and puzzle over how time and change are doing to us what it did to my father.
We inevitably talk about our children and how their lives are different and similar to our own at their age. We experienced fears, hopes and anxieties when we were young, yet for our children, the context of those feelings has changed, with some, like anxiety, pushed forcefully into the foreground. Their generation is equipped with the language of psychology to better describe what they are experiencing. Our generation didn’t have that language and didn’t talk about mental health issues. Bad feelings were just part of the bumps of life. We simply got on with it: sometimes to our benefit, sometimes to our detriment. We could be oblivious, or in denial, about the damage done.
That evening we went to a Jools Holland gig. The age profile of the audience was strikingly uniform. We could have gone to school with any of them
Yet for our children’s generation, that awareness can sometimes seem like overawareness: it can turn the idea of anxiety into a sort of monster that cannot be defeated. We couldn’t decide which situation was better.
That evening we went to a Jools Holland gig. The age profile of the audience was strikingly uniform. We could have gone to school with any of them. Like us, and unlike their children, they were the generation that didn’t ponder themselves so much.
It was an extremely enjoyable night, though we were particularly taken by a song during the encore: Enjoy Yourself. It was a hit for The Specials in 1980, though when I looked it up, the song is much older than that, and was originally released by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians in 1949 under the title of Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think).
Like all the best simple songs, the message is contained in that title: a kind of mindfulness that perhaps can only be achieved when you’re a bit older, and know that time is precious. When you’ve finally realised that overthinking can get in the way of joy.