Even my girlfriend had been besotted by The Beatles and was attracted to me by the fact that I looked like a rather rough cross between John and Paul. This idea that I was a lookalike did not endear them to me; I hated their music but coveted their stupendous and instant wealth. A group of Liverpudlians who over the previous year had climbed to world domination.
In the autumn, the Labour Party had just about won the election and formed a government with an infinitesimal majority. Harold Wilson, son of a northern lord mayor, Oxford graduate, and the first prime minister to speak with a northern accent. In late 1964 it looked as if the north had eclipsed the south. We in the south were presumably all part of some spoilt privilege and now the northerners were wiping the floor with us by colonising us.
I had a brilliant Christmas. Scottish Christmases in those days were largely under-celebrated. The buses still ran and the shops were still open. The big event was New Year’s Eve and Day. I was shocked by this as the world ground to a halt on Christmas Day in London. Edinburgh seemed indifferent to the madness of presents and decorated trees, lights and baubles.
The renaissance flowed henceforth; 1964 might have been the last quiet, pre-consumeristic, pre-hotting-up of the world into its current mad form. A form that eventually leads to all the connections that
we have. Our instantaneous world where there is no shadow. Just the glaring lights of connectivity. The mad expansion of mass consumerism, and with it all the damaging increase, for instance, in the price of housing that we face today.
How did this overheating of the economy come into being? Of the 100% of damage done to the environment, the first 50% took hundreds of years; the other 50% took the last 60 years. Since The Beatles revolution, an outbreak of the cult of youth and hedonism as the predominant culture came to pass in the UK. The rock’n’roll, social media obsession world of smartphones and constant purchasing owes much of its birth to the world I experienced as an 18-year-old.
What the 1960s seemed to do was destroy old age and create eternal youth. There seems now only one generation. And that is being young, or doing your damnedest to replicate it way beyond the years of being young. Entertainment is the big business, the big driving force. The way that the big dollars are made.
On the way south we got caught in snow at a little town called Morpeth and it was the most exciting part of my journey away from London. Walking down snow-packed medieval streets in the early hours was like walking around in a Christmas card. Little did I know of the vast commercial forces that were being unleashed on the Earth and would see an over-doubling of the world’s population and an incredible increase in wealth. Walking around in that Christmas card, ignorant of the blast of history coming down the line.
The most surprising thing for me looking back to 60 Christmases ago is how in all those years we never sorted out poverty, need, hunger and the despoliation of the planet. And how it all, all this increasing financial and business and social activity grew out of Hitler’s war. And how the creation of America’s supremacy came about because of that war. And how Hitler not only beefed up the American economy and drew it out of its 1930s depression, it also built Russia into a world power.
The war of Hitler made the modern world. Trump’s wealth came out of that war. And the opportunities to create a world dominated by The Beatles also came out of the wealth created by that war.
Trump apparently said last week at the opening of the rebuilt Notre Dame cathedral in Paris that “the world has gone crazy”. They might be his wisest words. The question is, what in hell’s name can we do about it?
Certainly the thinking we have so far practised is not enough. To uncrazy the world is going to take some deeper grasp of what causes us to be so crazy in this world in the first place.
I do hope you have a good Christmas and New Year.
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