Freebird

If I leave here tomorrow...

Not much chance of that, unfortunately for me or fans of prog rock and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

It's been a sunny, busy day, full of catching up with things I can't do while I'm working. I've been thinking about Caitlin Moran's column in the Times. She says she has cultural memories that would mean nothing to her children.

What can I recall from 'my' decades, the 70s and 80s? The importance of the (music) charts that were updated every Tuesday lunchtime; prog rock (ha!); girls that learned typing at school on manual typewriters; grey lino floor of the dole office, stained with stubbed out fag butts; waiting for hours at the hairdresser while my curly perm was setting; getting a suntan by slathering vegetable oil or butter all over; my mother's slimming breakfast drink of grapefruit juice and a raw egg; spam fritters.

About popular culture I remember little. Jingoistic Tee shirts worn at the time of the Falklands war; the Borg-McEnroe-Becker years at Wimbledon; novelty pop songs such as The Birdie Dance and Shaddapa your face.

I recall more about key events such as the General election of 1979, the Miners' Strike, the Falklands war, Nicaragua, the earthquake and mudslide in Mexico, the Bhopal Gas disaster, the attack on the Golden temple at Amritsar. Richard Nixon crying over the radio You get the picture...

What a shame I don't have children or grandchildren to bore with these stories! And surprising that I grew up in Co. Dublin in the early 1970s and was only mildly aware of The Troubles.

This rooftop / bird shot was snapped out of my study window as the sun was beginning to set.