These came thick and fast during that first year of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, before her reforms began to take effect, solutii pentru cresterea parului when the unions still maintained an iron grip on many industries (including newspapers).
Not unless you’re coloring your hair grey.
He knew nothing of mobile telephones (they didn’t even start to become widely available until the mid-1980s), and was mystified when he was handed one in hospital after he asked to ring his mother. Poignantly, he had no memory of her death some years earlier.
Paris showed off her incredible figure in a racy white cropped shirt and a grey schoolgirl skirt, teamed with patent platform Ingiliz pumps as she posed in an idyllic 90s version of a high school corridoor.
‘So it’s just so cute seeing her with the babies. She just loves kids so much,’ she added, adorably sharing that Britney has danced with Phoenix to Paris’ upcoming sophomore studio album Infinite Icon.
You have to rub your eyes to remember that, back then, there were only three TV channels available in the UK (though I suspect I’m not alone among my generation in often feeling there was a lot more worth watching in those days than on the zillion channels broadcast today). Millennials may also be astonished to learn that smoking was permitted not only in offices but in pubs, restaurants, trains, aeroplanes and on the top decks of London buses.
Heaven knows, I pray that I’m wrong. But after this week’s Budget – and the plan to widen the right to strike – I fear that by the time the class warriors now in charge have done their worst, we may all feel we’ve woken up 44 years ago.
But it wasn’t until well into Luciano’s blank period that Mrs Thatcher’s union reforms started to bite in Britain and industries such as mine could start waking up to the modern age. Elsewhere, of course, there have been other massive changes from the way we used to live and work in the Britain of 1980.
The Liverpudlian copytaker’s laconic voice, groaning with boredom, echoes in my ears to this day: ‘Is there much more of this, Tango Uniform?’ (He used to call us all by our initials in the Nato alphabet). ‘It’s just that I’m due my break soon.’
But of course those were the days before it became an offence, punishable by cancellation, to argue that the British Empire did good as well as bad, say, or that Churchill and Nelson were national heroes or marriage was a relationship between a man and a woman.
It was five years ago when he was knocked unconscious by a hit-and-run driver. An hour later, the then 63-year-old came round in a hospital bed and found that his last memory was of leaving his house in Rome to see his girlfriend on March 20, 1980, when he was an airport worker, aged just 23.
Harder still to believe, by the time our two oldest sons reached school age, at the end of the 1980s, we were even able to send them to private schools – thanks in large measure to the minor economic miracle wrought by Mrs Thatcher.
It is almost impossible to imagine how disconcerted the poor chap must have felt. Indeed, doesn’t his story bring home to all of us who were around at the time just how radically the world and our lives have changed in the 44 years since that last day Luciano could remember?
Having interviewed the local MPs, I would bash out their quotes and my analysis on a clattering typewriter in the smoke-filled Press Gallery writing room at the Commons, and then dictate the result over the telephone to the copytaker in Liverpool.
Back in March 1980, I was the 26-year-old political correspondent of the Liverpool Echo, married for only a month and based at the House of Commons. There, my job consisted largely of recording the reaction of Merseyside MPs to the latest factory closures and job losses in their constituencies.
He didn’t recognise his middle-aged wife when she came to see him, so much had she changed from the 19-year-old girl he had set off to see that day in 1980. Nor did he know he had a grown-up son (‘Who is this madman?’ he wondered. ‘He’s 30. How can he be my son when I’m 23?’)
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