This has been sitting unposted in my drafts since May. I felt it needed more work. But it’s Nablopomo. I’m desperate. Wait until you see what I end up posting tomorrow.
So to summarise, this is neither topical nor quite what I wanted to say. With that enticing introduction, I am sure that you are keen to read on.
There’s been a lot on the radio about 1968. The other day I was in the car and there was a woman on the Belgian radio saying how, although she was 35 in 1968, it had changed her life. She was pregnant with her third child and in the spirit of the times she had changed the school they planned to send the child to and she was looking forward to a bright, new, future. She wasn’t too pleased with the way it turned out.
Meanwhile, British Radio 4, when I switched over, was doing a somewhat heavy piece about the philosophers of ’68 and their thinking.
I’m not quite sure what I’m trying to get at here. In the French piece you could really sense that they were trying to change the world and imagine what it was like to be there then (I perhaps haven’t done it justice). The English piece was just a bit dull.
Well, in fairness to the Brits, I get the impression ’68 wasn’t anything like the same intensity in Britain as in France. In Paris, there really was a possibility they would topple the government. In London, they were mostly protesting about someone else’s war. But I had barely been conceived, so what do I know?
The radio 4 piece would have interested Ken, who is a philosopher by trade. It strikes me as quite an unusual angle on the much-mythologised 60s. But I, like you, would rather have listened to the Belgian one (if only my French weren’t so rubbish). I wonder what Irish radio had to offer that day?