Long life | 9 July 2015

The 1960s were already more than halfway over when I realised that I was living through what was supposed to be an exciting decade. I had got married, found a job, had two babies and was leading the stressful life of a young family man, quite unaware that all around me Britain was bubbling with excitement. In 1966 I was in Paris, doing night shifts as a trainee journalist for Reuters news agency, when I happened upon a cover of Time magazine, emblazoned with girls in miniskirts and boys in flared trousers, announcing that London was ‘the swinging city’. When I came home to check this out, London seemed much the same as it had been in the 1950s — a grey and grimy but dignified city, old ladies still wheeling their wicker shopping baskets up and down the Brompton Road. At one point during the Sixties, I had gone to a Beatles concert in Bournemouth, but I hadn’t enjoyed it.