SECURITY

SECURITY



When I was a kid I wondered about the decades leading up to my birth.
I especially was fascinated and haunted by the sixties. I was fascinated by what I’d learned and haunted by the thin and few memories of it. Paradoxically they were the least vivid memories and yet the first ones. Memory and attraction to youth culture fused into a common obsession. The obsession was both a reckoning and a reverie.


I always wondered what people were like in the forties, fifties and sixties. Were they like us lot at school in the seventies. What did vulgarity and expletives mean? How much did people expect from life? Did they look at what was then the present as an unwelcome modernity? Or were they able to recognise the magic as I and my generation suppose of it in hindsight?

I read and talk and ask and surmise and even accumulate facts that progressively add to my understanding of the history of sociological affairs and social mood but I still won’t ever really know. I cant judge how accurate a drama is set if the period is before I was around.


I look at the street I live in. It was built in the thirties. I’ve lived here on and off since I was nine. I remember dreaming with questions into the facades of these houses of their forma years. What parties had gone on here? They evidently occurred. There were less cars on the road and they had more style. I begin to see that I have a leaning to believe that the changes which have buried the past with the present are seldom an improvement. Imperial money. I prefer it’s weight and the sound it makes when dropped. I’m not going to give another example.


When Teddy boys walked up here the night sky above was as crisp and fresh and unspoiled and as real as the one I look up at tonight. To think that in addition to the clement feel of this street as it is now there was the joyful semi consciousness of a being in a world spinning much slower.

‘Hey bird dog keep away from my chic, hey bird dog you better………..’
Think of the smell of the leather seats inside those early Jags. No seat belt law. Just ‘You wanna lift darlin?’


The present is pointing different weapons of anxiety at us now. In memories of memories I find security.


TIM SANSOM 21ST OCTOBER 2006