In the days before rock and roll

A sudden flash of Christmases in the late 1970s, Christmas kids telly being different, and cold weather both in and out of our house, and things going on around the river.

I was thinking yesterday how the earliest part of my life all took place in a Victorian area of town, with decisions made about living there all made in the late 19th century and although there were a few changes, the subsequent years did not encroach on that. 

The borders of buildings and roads and parks were not moved from the plans laid out in the draughtsmans office, although water and gas and electricity, motor cars and then the telephone would eventually come to enhance the buildings.

Botley was all very much 20th Century, with 1930s houses and that sense of less established stuff going on - emotionally in the environment there were always odd borders and unfinished boundaries, poured concrete that never finished properly, and overgrown thorny borders where parts of living locally met up with parts of living nationally like bypasses and front gardens.

Where I live now is really new in comparison, the 1960s. But not as new as the brand new places being built, where electricity gas and water are being laid down in what were fields growing crops just a few years ago. less sense of human living history.

‘Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it’ – Mahatma Gandhi.