Europe - Them Or Us

Where we saw Nick Robinson, captured in Lego

The other day, we encountered Nick Robinson and a film crew trying to find a handbag shop at St Pancras station. We were killing time between trains from Gatwick Airport and onwards to York, and he provided a welcome distraction for my shopaholic daughter, who had already set her eyes on some bamboo socks that cost £4.95 a pair.

The reason for Robinson's handbag shop search became clear during the second part of his documentary series, Europe - Them Or Us. He needed something to introduce Mrs Thatcher trying to get her money back from the Common Market.

The programme was interesting because I learned that around the time I was born, Mrs Thatcher was ardently pro Europe, and the Labour Party were very much against it. How times subsequently changed.

Robinson gave a fairly balanced view and patiently worked his way through Maastricht, Black Tuesday, the Euro, and Blair's bid to be President. It certainly provided a useful historical background.

However, this terrifying referendum on June 23rd, caused by Cameron's own fear that the Tories would lose seats in Parliament to UKIP, will be decided by ignorance. The people that need to find out the facts won't have been watching Robinson's documentary. The sort of people who stand in the street and say "What did Europe ever do for us?" The people who think that Nigel Farage with his pint and booze and racist opinions is a great bloke. The people who think this referendum is about Syria and the refugee crisis and throwing out immigrants. The people who still think Britain has an Empire. The people who have no idea what the Tory Party might to do our country and workers' rights if they are given a free rein to act as they please. The people who think that the country will suddenly be billions of pounds richer if we no longer have to give the EU money, and that a Tory government will give all that money to them. The people sat on their sofas moaning that Bulgarians are taking their jobs while being too lazy to go out and get their own.

I am not saying that the EU doesn't have its faults, nor that these aren't turbulent times. But as far as I am concerned, I am European. I speak four European languages. I went to university in Germany. I love travelling. I want to be free to visit, live, study and work in and be part of places like this:

Heidelberg

and this:

Delft

and this:

Girona

and this

Porto

and this:

Desenzano

 and this:

Lake Bled

And these are just the places on water.

The ignorance of voters I fear is summed up for me by two individuals. The first is a man interviewed by Channel 4 News. He was a farmer, in receipt of EU subsidies. He owned a haulage company, whose vehicles were supplied and serviced by Renault in France. And yet he was campaigning to leave, adamant that his finances and his business would not be affected. The second is Scarlett Moffat of Gogglebox fame, who represents the "undecided" camp. She was watching the news when Boris "decided" he would side with the Brexit campaign. Moffat said she thought that Boris Johnson is trustworthy. Now, what exactly about Boris is trustworthy, I ask? But she said that if Boris is telling people to leave, then it must be for a good reason. And not at all because he thinks it will get him an easy ticket to become Prime Minister.

I am genuinely frightened by what Daily Mail and Sun readers and UKIP voters and Johnson & Gove could do to our country on June 23rd. So please, if you care about small things like travelling on holiday without needing a visa or being able to get free emergency healthcare if you become ill in another EU country, or big things like your rights to maternity and paternity leave and equal pay, the need for Europe-wide collaboration on security, trading at competitive prices, or just the fact that there is a mechanism in place to protect us from some of the worst of Tory rule, then don't let it happen. The divorce would be messy, and we would be the suffering children caught in the acrimony.

But thank you, Nick Robinson, for an interesting programme, even if the right people won't have watched it.

I still ended up having to buy those bloody socks though.

Shakespeare Live

Borrowed from another William, Bill Bryson

The clue was in the title. What we expected - and wanted - was an evening of Shakespeare live from the RSC. Since we don't get to go out much any more. Since York's theatre has been closed for the past year (and hardly ever does Shakespeare when it is open).

What we got was largely a load of dumbed down dross. To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death (or his 452nd birthday, depending on whether you are a glass half full or half empty kind of person), the folk at Stratford had staged a celebration of his work - or rather, a celebration of the influence of his work. This meant that the Bard's actual words were for the most part pushed aside by musicals, opera, ballet, comedy sketches and hip-hop.

A garden near to Stratford-on-Avon in the style of Anne Hathaway

Mnah. I suppose it was well-intentioned. Joseph Fiennes showed us some nice footage of Anne Hathaway's cottage and garden through the seasons in a sort of Alan Titchmarsh meets Monty Don kind of way. But did most of the people watching at home really need a Horrible Histories sketch to explain who Shakespeare was? This wasn't a child-friendly production. (We saw Judi Dench snogging Al Murray dressed as a donkey, for starters.)

For most of the two hours, they stuck to the funny stuff, just throwing in some tragedies towards the end. Even the excerpt from Henry V was the only scene in the whole play with a joke. They only let that famous speech from Hamlet happen after it had been mocked by Tim Minchin, Benedict Cumberbatch and, er, Prince Charles. Who had almost as many lines as Cumberbatch. That was another marker of the evening - the good, gritty stuff was too brief. Like Lady Macbeth's candle. They could have given Benedict more to do. He wasn't even allowed to play the character whose name he almost shares. It seems crazy that a botched song from Kiss Me Kate was allowed to go on for what felt like hours when soliloquays from King Lear or Richard II flashed by in an instant.

And then there was David Tennant and Catherine Tate, transported from the TARDIS to be the Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood of the evening, doing the links. When will people learn that nobody can read an autocue? It's what makes award ceremonies so excruciating, the news sound weird, and George W Bush sound like a moron. (And he didn't need much help.)

Juliet's Balcony (allegedly), Verona

Tennant and Tate both proved at other times during the evening that they can act. Unlike the terrible couple picked to perform the balcony scene from Romeo And Juliet, a play which got far more attention than it deserved. There were other great performances - David Suchet, Roger Allam, Anne-Marie Duff, Ian McKellan and Antony Sher did not disappoint. At the end, Helen Mirren as Prospero smirked at the audience and stole the show.

Some of the better things were on video. Songs sung by Alison Moyet and Ian Bostridge. (Not together, obviously.) And Simon Russell Beale. Oh, Simon Russell Beale. Don't ever dumb Shakespeare down; just make Simon Russell Beale do it. He'll make sure you understand it. He'll make you LOVE it. For Simon Russell Beale is never anything short of incredible. I am so lucky to have seen him in numerous productions (Shakespeare and non-Shakespeare) at the National Theatre when I lived in London - from Life of Galileo to Hamlet to Candide. He was amazing in every single one. So much so that I once saw him on the Tube and nearly said something. But I was scared I would start gushing uncontrollably, and the poor guy was just trying to get to work. And you don't talk to people on the Tube, EVER.

I have seen the RSC do many wonderful things over the years - at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle (£3 for a student stand-by seat in the gods), the Barbican in London, and most recently Henry VI Part 3 in a temporary theatre in Stratford known as "The Rusty Shed". (The Swan was being rebuilt.) But the person who introduced me to Shakespeare died recently, and so it was him I remembered on Saturday night. He was the Head of English at my school and put on a Shakespeare play every year. He too had been in the RSC, though we always joked that it was playing third tree to Judi Dench's Lady Macbeth. Which is possibly why he always tended to cast himself in the lead role. To be fair he was the only male available - it was an all girls' school, with a token three boys in the Sixth Form, none of whom could act. Generally our productions were like some mass Shakespeare's Globe gender reversal. But this teacher knew his stuff. Thanks to a bout of flu taking me out of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the only play I was ever in was Macbeth ("Hot potato, orchestra stalls, Puck will make amends!"). I had four lines and was then murdered, where I then had to lie dead on stage while Macduff and Macbeth did battle (with real swords) above my head. But I was also in the chorus and got to see the workings of the entire production and learn it by heart. And while we may not have given the best performance of the text ever ("Within this three mile may you see it coming; I say, a moving groove" said one of my friends earnestly as Birnam wood approached Dunsinane), I still think his interpretation of it was second to none. As they say, nobody ever forgets a good teacher. Dr Peter Cochran, RIP.

A moving groove

Victoria Wood

Two soups

I was shocked and - frankly - pretty devastated to hear of the death of Victoria Wood, well before her time. Cancer stole her from us at the age of only 62. Which is so utterly unfair. There are no words at a moment like this, especially as she was the one with all the good lines. Lines that made you laugh and made you cry in equal measure. I find it hard to accept that there will be no more, that her work is now complete. For her words made the everyday hilarious, the mundane massive and brought the things you had never noticed to the fore. The hostess trolley, the avocado. The Woman's Weekly, the Berni Inn. Judith Chalmers. Soup. Since Victoria Wood incorporated them into songs or sketches they have brought a snigger or knowing smile to our lips. But now they carry a bittersweet memory too.

I remember watching this stand-up show with my mum once and Mum laughed until she weed. Watching it again post-childbirth, I can see why. And not just because I am now that woman at the bus stop trying to exercise her pelvic floor. For I have had the poo-coloured wardrobe phase. I have been the new mother trying to get out of the house with toast in her hair. Victoria Wood was saying all these things before all the Mummy bloggers out there now. Back then it was so original and refreshing to hear someone tell it like it is.

Remembering my mum laughing like that makes me sad. My mum died of cancer at a similar age to Victoria Wood, and with similar speed. But given she used to drive between schools giggling to tapes of Victoria Wood she is lucky she didn't bump herself off in a car crash much earlier.

About ten years ago I managed to get two last-minute tickets to see Acorn Antiques: The Musical in the West End. As the tickets were in the stalls, it was the most money I have ever spent on going to the theatre. But it was totally worth it. Julie Walters as Mrs Overall was - as ever - astounding. And as the curtain lifted on the shop scene at the start of the second half, it's the first time I have seen a set alone get a cheer and round of spontaneous applause. Someone else played Miss Berta - Wood only appeared (as Mrs Overall) for some matinees, when Walters (according to Wood) was at Bingo.

The last thing of Victoria Wood's I saw (apart from her winning cakes on Comic Relief Bake-Off) was That Day We Sang, which I blogged about here. The quote at the top "I have a bit of life still owing" has an entirely different resonance now.

Victoria Wood was a true genius. Clever in such a down-to-earth way. She was witty and northern, shy and modest, awkward yet exuberant. And we all - probably without exception - loved her.

So farewell. And at least we will always have Barry and Freda:

..on me lower portions

Beat me on the bottom with the...

Bend me over backwards on me...

Five Star Babies: Inside The Portland Hospital

There's nothing more guaranteed to fill you with love for the NHS than seeing a private hospital on television.

Is that not what you'd expect? Do you think it would be better to spend thousands of pounds on your healthcare?

Well, in the case of childbirth, after seeing this programme on the UK's only private maternity hospital, the Portland in London, I think not. Childbirth is childbirth. There are only two routes out, and neither can be put on a long waiting list or severely delayed. There are only so many ways to kit out a delivery room or operating theatre. And the programme stressed that at the actual birth, there was no difference between the NHS and the Portland in terms of care received or procedures followed. In other words, you get told to "push into your bottom" either way. And nobody knows what that means.

But it rapidly became clear that all of the Portland's patients have more money than sense.

So what do you get for shelling out £10,000-40,000 on birthing your baby at the Portland? Champagne, for one thing. Foie gras. Lobster. Pretty much all the things you've been banned from eating and drinking for nine months. Oh, and an exquisite afternoon tea. Except that the rich new mummies are so obsessed with regaining their figure immediately after delivery that they all stick to fruit platters and grapefruit juice.

You can also purchase some exclusive baby mementos. Silver or bronze statuettes of your baby's feet. Everyone gets a gift bag containing a cuddly panda and who knows what else. (More champagne, presumably.) Puts that annoying Bounty Lady to shame - she's only trying to flog you a blurry photo before she hands over your child benefit forms and free sample of Johnson's.

What you do get at the Portland is Pat. Portland Pat will stay up all night in the nursery, looking after nine bawling babies while their mummies have a pedicure and get some sleep. Pat is a wonder. She has all the down-to-earthedness of a good NHS nurse, and she is a slightly incongruous figure amongst all these hormonal celebrities and moneyed chavs. "I never get a man in here who doesn't love Breaking Bad," she coos over fluffy pink baby Skyler.

Every woman gets her own personally selected consultant who follows her throughout her pregnancy, and through the birth. Which possibly explains why the Portland has such a high rate of Caesarians (50%) - these consultants, one of whom is a Countess married to the Earl of Bradford, don't like having their Easter lunches in Shropshire interrupted to go and have to deliver a baby naturally. They prefer it all scheduled to fit neatly into their day. We also see a consultant quick to intervene in a natural birth that had been progressing well. After one and a half hours of pushing the baby hadn't moved much, so after a swift attempt at Ventouse, she cuts the yoga teacher mummy open and whips said baby out. Consultants must naturally feel the urge to do something to earn their money - they are only called in when there is a crisis in an NHS birth, so they are not used to letting normal deliveries happen.

I would say that for that money there should be less strapping people to monitors and more birthing pools, more massages and more midwives offering soothing encouragement. For what do the midwives get to do at the Portland if everything is consultant led? A lot of cleaning, by the looks of it. And a lot of waiting on spoilt pampered women unwilling to do anything for themselves.

The worst of which is of course Hui, a Chinese "It Girl" fashion designer that I have never heard of. Her husband runs some sort of empire in Hong Kong, and generally seems so absent that she isn't even sure if he should be at the birth. (Her mum is at the hospital too and Hui is only allowed to take one person with her to theatre.) Hui is of course, too posh - or too scared - to push. Because having a baby has got to hurt, apparently. Whereas recovering from major abdominal surgery is of course entirely pain-free, right? Just ask my friend with the morphine allergy who had to recover from a C-section on paracetamol. Hui seems genuinely shocked when her consultant informs her that a Caesarian carries risk of organ damage and infection. Yes, even in this exclusive hospital. No amount of money will win that war on bacteria.

Hui's surgery goes well. However, Hui doesn't want to hold her baby until he has been thoroughly cleaned and had a nappy put on him. No skin to skin here. When he starts crying, she sends him off to the hospital nursery for Pat to look after. And from then on out she pretty much gets anyone else in the room to hold him other than her. It is of course difficult to move after a Caesarian, but any one of those fifty midwives would gladly hand her the baby if she was struggling. Once back home she has a nanny, who is apparently there to cook, clean, look after the baby and look after Hui. What Hui is left to do, I have no idea. Get her tummy tucked for her husband and then return to work, it seems. Unsurprisingly, she is on Nanny number two by the end of the programme.

The mummies are also all too posh to breastfeed, apparently. There are a lot of bottles of Aptamil being bandied about. During a tour of the hospital it is announced that the hospital has 50 midwives, but only one lactation consultant. Really? The NHS doesn't have enough breast-feeding support either, but at least it encourages it. There is nothing wrong with formula feeding, and I would never claim otherwise, but are any of these women even prepared to give breastfeeding a go? It can be lovely, it can be a battle, it can be the worst experience of your life, but the only way to know is to try. These women are all taking pills to stop their milk coming in, seemingly without having been offered any alternative by the hospital.

So yes, I ended the programme filled with love for the NHS. York District Hospital safely delivered my daughter five and a half years ago, and I have only praise for them and the care we received during our stay. Things weren't perfect (no water birth option, no en suite bathrooms, no private rooms), but if I'd had £40,000 to spare, I wouldn't have dreamed of giving a penny to the Portland Hospital instead. For the gas and air was on tap. My midwife was an angel. My wishes were listened to and respected. And foie gras may not have been on the menu, but the toast I was offered for breakfast once my daughter finally emerged after 36 long hours of labour was one of the best (and most welcome) meals of my life.

I was also very lucky as York Hospital was not busy that day. I think it might have been a very different story if it had been a day when they were getting slammed with patients. I was the only one in my post-labour ward for 16 hours, and then only had to share it with one other person (rather than the usual three). I was very weak, so they also took my baby away for a couple of hours in the night to an impromptu nursery in the corridor so that I could have a break and some sleep. (Not that I got any sleep, but it was a kind thought.) I could well have wanted a few nights of being looked after in a luxury hotel after the birth (or really just a bit longer in hospital), but I don't think it would have made breastfeeding less stressful or my stitches heal any faster.

I used to work just around the corner from the Portland Hospital. I never really paid it much attention, since I was usually scuttling past to get to the office, the Tube station, Regent's Park or the great deli at Villandry. So I never saw any celebrity babies or future Arab sheiks being wheeled out of the building in their expensive prams or car seats. Besides, I didn't really "do" babies in those days. Now I would shout out that they were all fools, and had been taken well and truly for a ride. But would they listen? Would they care? No. For money is for them no object.

Dunblane: Our Story

I wasn't there. I have never been to Dunblane and my links to the town are tenuous - my husband has cousins who once lived there. And they didn't live there then. So really I have no right to write about Dunblane. But this documentary on BBC2 on Wednesday night was so restrained and calm and yet so unbearably moving that I instantly felt compelled to put pen to paper. The dignity of the survivors was overwhelming. There was no anger or bitterness, but there was a profound, never-ending sadness. There were lost dreams and shattered lives. Baby sisters grew up never knowing their older sibling. Widowed partners lost their only child. A daughter lost a mother; a mother who died trying to protect pupils in her care. A headmaster walked into a stinking, smoke-choked room of massacred children. The world was just too cruel that day.

But somehow the survivors did survive, a small triumph of love and hope over the evil that came to the town of Dunblane on March 13th 1996. We all know about the world-famous tennis player that had a miraculous near miss. These were some of the others, who had until now been silent. Some were lucky, some desperately unlucky, but all of them were changed forever. It's a credit to the school headmaster that he was able to carry on after what he had witnessed, and bring the school and the community together. He helped the townspeople fend off the fierce media spotlight by acting as their spokesman, so that normal life, somehow, could resume. The school was back open after nine days. The children needed somewhere to go, and something to focus on. It was the right decision.

But the school has a new gym now. There are some places you cannot return.

I wasn't there, but Dunblane is one of those events that you always remember where you were when you heard about it. I was in my second year at university, and came into our kitchen to find my housemate Mark in tears. He was watching the one o'clock news on our crappy black and white television, which perched on the microwave with a coathanger for an aerial and only intermittent signal. But the news itself was clear: we were bearing witness to the aftermath of one of the worst mass murders ever to happen on British soil. (What I didn't realise until I saw this documentary is that the world was told what had happened before some of the children's parents, who were kept waiting in a house next to the school.)

It was utterly unfathomable. 20 years on, it's still hard to take in. Now I have a five year old daughter, exactly the same age as the children who were killed that day. So it hits home even harder to contemplate what happened. That a man, a local oddball youth leader known to police, could drive into the grounds of my daughter's school unnoticed, enter the building carrying four handguns and 700 rounds of ammunition, find the school hall and fire 105 bullets into her PE lesson, killing her, her teacher and 15 of her classmates, doesn't bear thinking about. It's too shocking and terrifying for words. And yet that is what happened in Dunblane.

We may bemoan the extreme security measures schools have in place these days. The high-perimeter fences, electronic gates and buzzer systems, the grilling from the office staff as they hand over the signing in and out books, the CCTV, the obsession with safeguarding in Ofsted reports. But we should only be thankful, if it means that no Thomas Hamilton can ever be allowed to wander off the street into a school again.

No school could possibly have expected something quite so horrendous to happen, especially not in a small community like Dunblane, where everybody knew each other. But security had definitely taken a back seat until then. For example, kids broke into my primary school one night in 1984 and burned it down. The gate was easily vaulted over, and nobody saw them go in. But thankfully, no one was hurt, and all I lost was a geography project. Nothing, in the grand scheme of things. During the school day, the gates were open to all and sundry, and anyone could walk right up to the outside of our classrooms. But only parents came in, bringing in forgotten packed lunches or dinner money. We had no reason not to keep our innocence. But at least when that innocence was lost, something was done. Although too late for the town of Dunblane.

The private ownership of handguns, despite opposition from the gun lobby, was banned in the UK in 1998. There have of course been horrific classroom murders since, and these are just as significant and awful, but none have involved guns. Which is more than you can say for the United States, where it seems like there is a mass shooting in a high school every other day. And often it's children touting the guns. Obama says it must stop, but apparently too many Republican senators disagree, because nothing is ever done.

As for Dunblane, what we will never know is - why. Rest in peace, you brave, beautiful, innocent, wonderful children.

"Snowdrops were out in profusion..." 

The Night Manager

Mm, so sleek. Le Carre has been made all Ian Fleming and Cubby Broccoli - no more the real phlegm and soggy broccoli of the school dinner atmosphere of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. There are diamonds, martinis, fast cars, expensive watches, and an opening titles sequence straight out of Shirley Bassey. In fact, I think Tom Hiddleston is probably using this as his casting reel to be the next 007, once he gets a little craggier. He's certainly got the charm for it. Although his charm had well and truly tipped over into psychopath territory by the middle of the second episode.

The Night Manager's M is a very pregnant Olivia Colman as Angela Burr, with an unidentifiable northern accent and no budget for central heating. (Here, in the cold, there is real phlegm.) I am not sure who she is working for. She seems to be half of a two-person team who occasionally have meetings at MI6 in Vauxhall or the Foreign Office in Whitehall, but otherwise are rogue roamers. Mrs Burr can fly to Zermatt in an instant, despite being in her third trimester, and is able to eavesdrop on conversations from Cairo to Mallorca.

There is no Q. Hiddleston, as Jonathan Pine, has to raid dustbins to retrieve Sim cards, and break into his own safe. But Pine's army training means he's a dab hand at breaking a man's arm, ejecting someone from a snooker room, or tying an electrical extension lead round their neck. But he'll also pour your champagne perfectly, seduce you Bond-style in a flash, relocate you to the back of rural beyond, and never seems to sleep.

The baddie is Hugh Laurie, who is charming too, but with a dash of snake poison just below the surface. He is Richard Roper, a wealthy philanthropist giving speeches in front of a Unicef flag while dealing arms to the evil warlords behind it. He is calm, affable, terribly reasonable - but the terrifying is unmistakably there. It will surface, and soon. For now, Pine is lying in Roper's Mallorcan villa with two black eyes and a broken nose. He is a mystery to them. Is he mussel man or muscle man? We're not sure how they are going to find out. They've done the Google side of things, unearthing his CV and Burr's false trail of identity for him. But they aren't yet convinced. I suspect there may be a waterboard in the wardrobe.

Tom Hollander, Roper's sidekick Corcoran, is more openly threatening. But even he is jolly nice about it. Affable Rev, laced with strychnine. "I will hood you and hang you up by those lovely ankles until the truth falls out of you by gravity. Toodleoo."

Maadi, Cairo

What a difference between the luxurious hotels where the Night Manager works and the places we have stayed. It must be because we aren't multi-billionaires or illegal arms dealers and don't tend to arrive places by luxury yacht or helicopter. Our abode in Maadi, Cairo wasn't grotty so much as basic. A skyscraper hotel of brown glass, with an empty swimming pool on the roof and slightly creaky plumbing. But it did have a view of the Pyramids, glimpsed across the Nile behind the minarets of the mosque next door. Loudspeakers perched on the minarets woke us daily at four with the morning call to prayer.

Empty rooftop pool

View of the Pyramids and River Nile

Or you could say that the Pyramids had a view of our hotel

Cairo seemed even busier and crazier than the chaotic Cairo in the midst of the Arab Spring depicted in The Night Manager. We didn't dare cross a road in our attempt to find somewhere for dinner. The traffic was lethal. We ate pizza in a restaurant down the street, surrounded by potted palms and men smoking hookah pipes.

More The Night Manager's style

And then the action moves to Switzerland. Not being a skier, the only time I have been to Zermatt, I was 15 and staying in a Eurocamp tent with my family somewhere near Susten. The train from Visp was more rickety than the streamlined red SBB models ridden by Pine, and for some reason I have in my head that it was powered by steam. Once there, the shops were full of tat, and my mum got locked in a public loo while my brother made up a jingle for Peugeot cars. Which he pronounced Pee-go. But I do remember the beautiful Matterhorn; a wisp of cloud clutching at its pinnacle that would never quite leave.

Zermatt tourist tat

My family munching at the Matterhorn

80s glamping in Susten

Only in Devon has our holiday accommodation looked similar. My parents had quite the knack for finding dodgy cottage rentals. No TripAdvisor then, you see. Farmhouses with bad carpets, stubborn chickens in the garden refusing to lay eggs, and Alan Wells winning the 100 metre gold at the Moscow Olympics on a fuzzy black and white television screen. Here it was my brother's turn to get locked in the toilet.

Back In Time For The Weekend

Mum and me at my dad's company sports day, 1974.
Dressed by Cloth-Kits, by the looks of things.

It's another series of flashbacks to my childhood. This time Giles Coren takes a family (the Ashby-Hawkins) back to the leisure activities of bygone decades. It's exactly the same format as Back In Time For Dinner, only with less food, and less likable kids. I'm finding them too posh and privileged and full of themselves, and too likely to take the piss out of their parents for the slightest misdemeanour. Typical teenagers, you might argue, but they're annoying.

The kids are from a generation that spend their lives staring at screens. They would rather sit at home and Skype their friends than go out and see them in the flesh.

But in the 1970s and 80s, they can't do that. So it's off to the park to climb on splintered wood and steel scaffolding screwed into concrete, before lacerating their hands on a zipwire. Never did us any harm. My brother, who split his head open in our local adventure playground when he ran into a concrete tube and forgot to duck, may disagree.

Never did us any harm

But we were left to roam, to ride our bikes around the streets and chase each other through the alleyways. Children can't do that any more. There are too many cars on the road. Too many perverts. (Though I am sure, as the Savile Report testifies, there were plenty of those in the 1970s too.) Nowadays, two thirds of kids have never been to the park on their own.

The family finds the 1970s fun. There are spirographs and slinkies, and selfies with the camera. (Except that selfies were not a "thing" when I was little.) There is a lot of dancing. There wasn't much dancing in our house. As a university lecturer once said to me, "Some of us listen to opera, some of us listen to Boney M." In our house, it was opera. No rollerdiscos for us.

Opera in the lounge

And it's fun despite the fact for a lot of the time, there's no electricity, no petrol and for the summer of 1976, no water either.

Me in my home-made 1976 desert

And it's fun despite the fact that the kids are left outside pubs, sat in the car with a packet of crisps. The car is a Renault 5, given to the family by Angela Rippon, the original presenter of Top Gear. Take that, Clarkson. She has so much more style than you.

The 70s sunlounger

And I had my own

But at least there was a summer, and snow in winter. We had a sun lounger just like the one in the Ashby Hawkins' garden. And my dad got to use it.(See above.) Because it was sunny. The family go on holiday - a camping trip in the great outdoors, which is a lot less fun in the 2015 weather. No pop-up tents - it takes Mum and Dad a good few hours to erect the poles, while the kids whine in the Renault 5. But there's much to tell their friends in a slideshow when they get home, a tradition which my parents maintained well into the 1990s.

Proper snow in winter, even Down South

The 70s is a decade when people start to buy rather than rent their home. (The Ashby-Hawkins talk the bank manager into lending them a £5,000 mortgage.) This begins a trend for DIY. (Do I really have a memory of my dad on the roof, wrestling with a central heating flue?) The Ashby Hawkins install a corkboard wall, so Eric Bristow can teach them to play darts. (There seems to have been a lot of retired darts players on television recently.)

Yes, I really do

There's home brew, and the arrival of a colour telly, which greatly improves the family's enjoyment of Pot Black. We had to make do with black and white until at least 1984. Which is how we got to know our new next-door neighbour in 1981, because he invited us round to watch Charles and Di get married in colour.

Rob actually saw Charles and Di get married in the flesh, so to speak, since he and his mother camped outside St Paul's Cathedral for five nights in July 1981. If you look carefully, you can see their tiny heads on the television footage, which Rob is now watching for the very first time, at a retro red white & blue (indoors) street party.

In the 1980s, the house turns into a cluttered jumble of chintz and technology. They stencil the walls and scent the lounge with pot pourri. Son Seth is excited by the technology - a home computer that has to be programmed every Basic line of the way. This means he no longer goes out into the garden to enjoy their Flymo manicured lawns and hedge-trimmer strimmed privet. (It's possibly safer that way. I have an uncle who lost a toe to a Flymo.)

I was dragged out into the garden to show off my Brownie uniform.
Brother with chair.

When Seth isn't on the computer, he's watching videos on the new VCR, which only he can work. He does at least have to go outside to rent the videos from the local Blockbuster. No online streaming here. But on the high street, the cinemas are closing down. As are the youth clubs, so prevalent in the 1970s. Kids are going to play video games in arcades instead.

Whereas we went to National Trust properties

The family have become spendaholics. There's a second car to the Vauxhall Cavalier - the Ford Fiesta. If Mrs Ashby Hawkins had had her way there'd be a Sinclair C5 on the drive as well. There's another telly in the kitchen, on the breakfast bar. From 1983, there's Breakfast TV to watch on it too. There's a phone they can walk around with (even if it's still on a wire) rather than having to stay sat on the stairs. There's a Walkman to jog with. There are British Gas shares to make them rich. (But there's Live Aid to make them feel guilty.) Everyone wants to be as American as Ronald Reagan, with Dallas shoulder pads, Miami Vice jackets, and a fear of nuclear Armageddon. The look is all highlights, perms and big glasses, with a touch of Madonna thrown in. And Nick Kamen boxer shorts and Levi 501s for the boys. It's the end of the Y front.

Who is paying for it all? Why Access, our flexible friend.

Daughter Daisy goes looking for a rave, but she definitely needs to work on her acid house moves. She wasn't much good at breakdancing either. Probably safer to stay home and tape the Top 40. Her mum, having finished her Jane Fonda workout, is out at a new "ladies friendly" wine bar. The dad seems content to be at home, (finally) doing a small share of the chores and indulging in a secret passion for 80s television. He rustles up some Del Boy style cocktails at a party to celebrate the end of the decade.

In the 1980s, work starts to intrude on family life. Not just because the mother is out at work to help pay for all their spending. It's mainly because we are now contactable 24/7, thanks to the rise of pager systems. Pagers will of course will turn into mobile phones, and then into mobile internet and wifi and remote logins for e-mail access - all of which mean that we will never truly be able to switch off from our jobs again, or have leisure time which is just about us, leaving the day-to-day grind behind.