A decade of lost marbles, plastic panic and fame in an instant...
IN childhood, the years of our lives are distinct, each with rich, unmistakeable flavours. Ask me about 1976 and I’ll tell you about Aberdeen’s tropical summer, swimming in the North Sea, or who my teacher was at primary school.
Try me on ’78 and I’ll tell you about Grease: The Original Soundtrack, which I received that christmas along with a record player to hear it on.
That was also the year we started purloining favourites from the pop charts by taping them from the wireless on things called radio cassette recorders.
If years were distinct, decades were different galaxies.
The 1970s were all about flares, digital watches, Ford capris and casual sexism in sitcoms. The 1980s were nothing like that. They were about Sinclair computers, alternative comedians, Higher Physics and angst. Lots of angst.
Ask me about 2009, on the other hand, and I’ll tell you I haven’t a clue, mate. Remind me who was christmas number one that year and I will probably never have heard of them. How did 2009 distinguish itself from the years before or after? Don’t be ridiculous. By middle age it is all mush and we excuse our inability to keep track of timelines by repeating phrases such as ‘plus ça change…’
What we mean by this is we are seasoned observers who have seen most things before. Why bother with the feverish chronicling of dates and places when, on the basis of a scant few decades’ experience, we have already concluded that history repeats itself?
Well, as a wise man once said, it is not history which repeats itself, but historians.
And if you doubt it, consider the past ten years. For my final column of the decade, I thought I would do just that – see what changes have come over us and our lifestyles, our nation and the world in which it yaps like a miniature dachshund for attention.
Predictably, it was mostly mush when I first peered into the rear view mirror. But a little research sharpened the picture considerably. Just one decade ago, for example, we lived in a country which could only imagine having a tennis player who could compete with the greats deep in major tournaments.
Sure, yon Andy Murray was handy with a racket but he was young, impetuous and, as of late 2009, had split up with his girlfriend Kim Sears – according to friends, because he couldn’t tear himself away from his computer games.
The year 2019 finds many of us talking about happilymarried-to-Kim and father-ofthree Sir Andy as Britain’s greatest-ever sporting hero.
What happened in the twenty-teens? A boy from Dunblane won Wimbledon – twice – providing the most precious sporting memories of my lifetime.
Oblivious
A decade ago most of us were oblivious to our voracious consumption of plastic and of the journeys polythene bags and cotton buds and Pot Noodle cartons went on after we threw them in the bin. We wouldn’t have known a carbon footprint from a caribou’s one.
Today our environmental awakening may not be complete but is at least happening. Today we do not simply gaze in wonder at the wildlife the cameras have captured in the latest David Attenborough series but boil with rage, too, that these creatures’ natural habitats are being razed at a terrifying rate.
We have also become, in comparison with a decade ago, political sophisticates – and are unhappier for it.
Back then, an independent Scotland was a distant doctrine – the stuff of dreams for many but shudder-inducing for many more. Yes, the SNP was in power in Scotland but only in a minority government and, by the next Holyrood election, surely, normal Labour service would be restored. Silly rabbits that we were.
Who would have imagined that, within a few years, the party Tony Blair led twice to victory in the Noughties would have become a political irrelevance in Scotland while, in England, its heartlands would be routed by Tories?
Who foresaw how toxic a place first Scotland and later the rest of the UK would become on the back of two bitterly fought referendums, neither of which seemed likely a decade ago?
Political history did not repeat itself. It became a runaway train. It is still running.
In the year 2009, a few dozen entrepreneurially minded Edinburghers were renting spare bedrooms to tourists on a new platform called Airbnb.
Ten years on, the centre of our capital is a thronging theme park inhabited almost exclusively by short-term visitors.
There are more than 12,000 Airbnbs in Edinburgh now, most of them are in the middle of it and most of those who used to live there have decanted to the suburbs for some peace and quiet.
Those who do still live in Edinburgh city centre face such indignities this Hogmanay as having to wear wristbands to allow security staff to recognise them as householders – and applying for permits to bring in the Bells at home with friends.
Edinburgh in the twentyteens? A story about marbles and the loss thereof.
While we are on the subject of insanity it is worth recording that no one had heard of Instagram a decade ago. Today, it governs many people’s lives and acts as their portal into many other lives, too. When, for example, a court bans a TV presenter from seeing her boyfriend after she allegedly smashed a lamp over his head, Instagram is the place where they rake over the coals and get their sides of the story out.
‘Been advised not to go on social media,’ wrote caroline Flack this week on social media. She then splurged about all the scrutiny and speculation surrounding her – as she emitted yet more social media babble to be scrutinised and speculated about.
Meanwhile, subverting the ongoing court process, boyfriend Lewis Burton gets his oar in: ‘She did not hit me with a lamp. Arguments do happen every day in every relationship.’ Really? Another thing I hadn’t appreciated about the current decade.
Warming to his theme, Mr Burton addresses his girlfriend directly. ‘Gutted I can’t spend christmas with you. I want to repeat – I never pressed charges and asked the other day for the bail conditions to be dropped but no one listened to me.’
Well, they’re listening now. Squillions of ’em.
Dramas
In the space of a decade, celebrity culture has disappeared so far into its own fundament that it is now entirely normal for tiffing showbiz couples to air their dramas on social media for fans to chew over. Send a text or a private message? What, and forego all that attention?
Plus ça change, we say, but in truth we move in times very different from those we knew even a decade ago.
In the retail sector practically every till operator now wants our email address – not, in truth, to save paper by pinging our receipt to our inbox but to bombard us until the end of time with marketing.
Every second email I receive implores me to write a review for a new purchase: a guitar stand, a picture frame. Sit down and pen a review? For free? More insanity.
I should not be surprised if, by the time the New Year is a few minutes old, we receive email requests to review the 2020s. Let’s see how they pan out first. Let’s see if, some time over the next ten years, we rediscover any of those lost marbles.