#17

And the year before all that you had ol’ Bill Clinton bombing Iraq during the Lewinsky scandal.

1 Like
#18

Last episode of Seinfeld

#19

…four days around November 1997-February 1998?

1 Like
#20

Brief simmering of the Balkan Wars, but yeah bombing of Iraq. Asian financial crisis in 1997

#21

My mum was a kid at the time - at the height of it her whole school were taken out into the playing field, headmaster told them a lot of people might die and then they all prayed. Must have been absolutely terrifting.

I lived in pretty much constant fear of nuclear war as a kid in the 80s too.

#22

:man_shrugging:

1 Like
#23

Same, joined the Nuclear Disarmament Party at the age of 12 or something. Chernobyl didn’t help even though it wasn’t really anything to do with nuclear weapons. Then they give you so much dystopian fucking fiction to read as a kid, I swear the first three novels I ever had to read for school were I Am David, Bridge to Teribithia and Z For Zachariah. Holocaust, death and nuclear holocaust. Somehow avoided The Diary of Anne Frank but it was on the curriculum.

1 Like
#24

Yep. For me it was when the wind blows, threads and brother in the land.

Vividly remember all the disasters that seemed to be happening every few months in mid to late 80s too:

Challenger
Piper alpha
Herald of free enterprise
Hungerford
Kings x fire
Chernobyl

Then all the worries about acid rain and ozone layer…

Havent even mentioned general grimness of life under thatcher - my dads job constantly being at risk… yeesh.

#25

Reckon @eltham cracked it first try with sometime in the late eighteenth century

1 Like
#26

I’m going with April 1954

#27

At least we dodged that bullet, with a Labour government from 1983-1996. I remember the night they were elected, my mum alternating between unbridled laughter and tears of happiness, ringing all seven of her surviving siblings to share the joy and rub it into the one Liberal voter among them. Bob Hawke had been persona non grata a couple of months earlier when he’d knifed the incumbent Bill Hayden but all was forgiven now.
But by the end of the decade as I was getting ready to finish school, mortgage rates were 17% and youth unemployment was over 20% and things were looking grim. It’s actually remarkable they held on until 1996.

1 Like
#28

wouldn’t say it’s been that long but can’t really nail down a date.

#29

forgot about this, all-timer headline

2 Likes
#30

hahahaha unlucky Malcolm

1 Like
#31

And all that set to the backdrop of the Cold War, which almost went hot in '83:

True. No fan of Thatcher but her rise to power has to be contextualised. The late 70s weren’t exactly a barrel of laughs:

#32

When I was a student I went to work at a MoD research facility (in 2001). At the time the MoD used the bikini alert system which had a colour coding system for the level of threat to the country. The threat level was displayed at the entrance to the site and you’d see it as you drove in every day. If I recall correctly the level had just gone down to Black, as the level of IRA threat had decreased significantly and it was deemed the U.K. was in a fairly good place. Then 9/11 happened and it went to Red briefly, then remained at Amber. So yeah, I reckon those few months before 9/11, for the U.K. anyway.

1 Like
#33

fair enough i guess

Screenshot 2020-06-06 at 12.23.32
Screenshot 2020-06-06 at 12.23.322090×138 23.7 KB

#34

Even though I was only 14 I remember a sense of actual hope around then. Of course, it wasn’t globally true and then 9/11 happened. I remember watching the air strikes on Baghdad lying on my parents’ sofa while off school with a migraine and I think that’s sort of set the tone from there for me

#35

We were evacuated clutching our gas masks (each member of staff had one) as we were a top target, it was all very surreal. The students had a social arranged night and instead we all gather in my house to watch the news.

#36

Around that time that’s when my malaise begun.That’s when I became very cynical of everything, politically speaking.

I went on two anti-war marches, the first being in October 2002 and then in March 2003 - the ‘1 million march’. With Bush and Blair refusing to acknowledge widespread opposition, and a dawning realisation that it was going to happen anyway, I felt so politically impotent, which I’ve never shaken off since.

Wake me when they bring in PR.

1 Like