And then there’s the unknown of who I will/won’t meet. What if we just find ourselves walking alone for most of the time – will people want to talk to a small, untidy man with a bedraggled corgi in tow? My brother-in-law (a very accomplished travel writer) told me not to worry too much about sticking to a fixed route or timetable. If I want to get drunk with a couple of farmers in a Welsh pub and hear their stories I should just go with the flow, maybe hang out in the town for a few days. What if I don’t meet Dai and Llewelyn? More pertinently, what if I do but don’t want to go on a 48 hour bender in a border town. Will that make my trip very dull?

OK. So that’s some of the unknowns which will make themselves a bit clearer once we start. But then there’s the bit of me that seems to be just making life harder than it needs to be. I have a habit of doing 90% of a job well, and often super efficiently, but all too often the last 10% never happens. I can give a room two coats of emulsion in the time that it takes most people to find the masking tape, but I’ll settle for just one coat on the skirting board if the paint is running low. I’ll get to the street where someone lives just on motor memory, but I won’t have their house number. Sometimes the missing 10% will be critical, sometimes not at all. Occasionally it will be irritating to me (that skirting board still catches my eye) but a lot of the time I get away with it until I don’t.

I’ve had the basic details of my route for months, ever since I visited Bruce and Chris in Wales. I’ve had a date in mind for when the walk would actually start (the beginning of September). I’ve broken in my walking boots and begged and borrowed kit to camp with. I’ve bought maps, downloaded the Ordinance Survey app and invested in a charger in case my phone runs out. 90% of what I need to do is ticked off. But working out what I will actually do on day one, where I will be walking and, critically, where I will try and sleep (in my sausage tent) has been put off until the trip is in sight. I’ve bought collapsable dog bowls for Scout, but I’ve got no idea what or how I will be eating. I was assuming there’d be a shop somewhere on the journey, but unless I go that extra 10% and find out, I won’t know. Could be kibble for both of us.

Why do I do this to myself? I wonder sometimes if I am just pre-programmed to miss the last part of a task. It’s like reading a newspaper article and skipping the last paragraph (which is exactly what I do). I’ve got the gist of things – that’s enough, isn’t it? Basically, I get very little joy from finishing things off, so, given an option, I don’t. But in this case, I need to. I have to learn how to ‘eat the frog’ as my wife, Katie, calls it– something you don’t want to do, but where you just have to get your spoon ready and go for it.

In this case, what that means is opening up the paper maps and realising that my reading vision is too poor to make sense of the little footpaths I’m wanting to take. That in turn means going instead to the OS app on my phone and watching a few videos on YouTube to decode how you pull together a route (or at least 90% of it). The app helpfully gives a distance and time guide. I’ve booked campsites for the first two nights but they’re ambitious goals and the third night will definitely be a wild camp unless someone takes pity on us. The fourth night is hopefully with a friend if he can find us.

Very, very roughly, if we walk every day, we might just about get to London in about 3 weeks. But the reality is I will just have to take one day at a time. There will be good days and not so good days. Perhaps I will just have to accept that I can’t plan everything too much even if I wanted to. Sometimes we will need to stop and rest up, sometimes power ahead. It’s all a bit unknown and maybe that’s the essence of any journey that’s worth taking. The bottom line is that I’m choosing to do this in the first place even if I can’t choose how it happens. That’ll have to be enough control for me.

Not sure this does justice to how small a space it is.

The story marinated somewhere in the deeper recesses of my mind. I kept on writing, a hobby I had had for years, and then, after years of trying, I finally got an agent. He showed initial interest in a memoir I’d written about how a Dutch footballer from the early 1980s helped me navigate being sent off to boarding school at the age of 11. It all felt very exciting – could someone actually be interested in what I was writing about? - but after a little while the harsh reality of economics kicked in as he realised that the book might only appeal to a Venn Diagram that included people interested in boarding schools, the early 1980s and, crucially, Dutch footballers. It wasn’t a huge intersection. I could see my relationship with the agent disappearing before it had even started.

‘Was there any other project that I was working on?’ came the question as we reached the end point of a very disappointing phone call, and the corgi and cowboy story landed like a lifebuoy to rescue me. Could I walk all the way from the middle of nowhere in Wales to Smithfield Market in London with Scout?

‘OK,’ said the agent, rising to the challenge, ‘Let’s see if we can work it up into a proposal and see how it looks.’

And so, it began.

I knew nothing about the Welsh Drovers but the more I read up on them, the more fascinated I became. These tough, hardy, often fiercely clever men were capable to gathering in herds of up to 400 cattle and a 1000 sheep from all the small farmsteads littered across Wales (that’s what a ‘drove’ is, I learned– a herd or flock of animals moving together). Once gathered, all the cattle would need to be shoed with two ‘cues’ for each foot – essentially half a horseshoe – so that they could manage the whole two hundred mile plus journey. And then, without the benefit of maps or even roads, the whole procession would march its way across Wales and into England, travelling at a slow enough speed that the animals wouldn’t lose their condition but fast enough that they’d actually get to where they needed to go in the end. On the way they’d have to deal with wolves (at least until the 17^th century), highwaymen and the deep distrust that many people had towards anyone on the move. They’d have to navigate using natural features to guide them (including the Scot’s Pines that they planted to indicate inns and paths), ford rivers, find a safe route through the marshy boglands and then, at the end of their journey, thread their vast herds through the streets of the biggest city in the world to Smithfield, the huge livestock market in the heart of London.

What fascinated me was how little was known about these extraordinary men and their animals. It was a way of life that existed for centuries, stretching back into the Middle Ages (and probably further) all the way up until the height of Victoriana and then, suddenly, it went. Railways, the AI of the 19^th century, changed the patterns almost overnight. It was now possible to ferry beasts to market in days instead of weeks. For people living on the droving routes, the familiar noise and chaos of a half mile’s worth of animal tramping its way past their doors perhaps ten or fifteen times a year vanished. Inns that relied on the drover’s custom – and renting out fields as overnight grazing – were marooned. Blacksmiths who shoed the cattle became redundant and corgis, so important to the whole process, lost their purpose as a breed. They didn’t die out and some (especially the Cardigan corgis) were still used on farms, but these working dogs became companions, softer versions of themselves.

There were a few books about drovers, but most with an out-of-print-smalltown-museum vibe or else that dry historical equivalent of accountancy where you feel your interest sapping at another table of hay bushel prices in the 18^th century. What I did find online, though, was a brilliant labour of love called Local Drove Roads where a man called Bruce Smith had decided to gather all the routes taken by drovers all over the country, from Scotland, East Anglia, the South and, of course, Wales. He’s been exploring all the different paths and gathering information from others ever since he retired as a schoolteacher, some twenty years ago. He’d even met his wife, Chris, on a drove road so it was very much a life passion.

After a few conversations on the phone, they invited me down to their house in Wales where we laid out maps across the kitchen table and tried to eat our soup without spilling it on footpaths and bridleways. They were charming, hospitable and fascinated by the idea of me walking a route with a corgi. But I also realised as I drove away (no pun intended), that there was no way back now. The idea was out there, like a genie released from the bottle.

I was going to have to do this walk

Scout looking deeply unimpressed with the idea of a 200+ mile walk

I knew something was up a few weeks ago, just a sense that all wasn’t quite right in his world. He’s been pretty deaf and blind for the past year or so but still able to follow directions on walks thanks to motor memory and extravagant semaphore on my part. Health wise, he was pretty robust and then, suddenly, he wasn’t. It was almost as if he’d decided that his innings was due to come to an end. He stopped eating and drinking, took up his favourite position on the sofa, and gently faded away. We all had the chance to sit with him over the next four days and it was Katie and I who were with him at the end, stroking his head as his heart decided that it had used up its allotted number of beats. His final gift to us; a quiet, dignified death.

I think I went through a lot of the raw sadness in the days leading up to his death, including a slightly embarrassing discussion at the vets where I managed to reduce myself, the receptionist and an innocent cat-owning bystander to tears as I tried to find out what the process was if, and when, he did die. His passing, in contrast, has released a rather joyous kind of melancholy. He was an extraordinary dog; intelligent, affectionate, aware that his place in the family eco-system was below the children but still fundamental to making us all work. He was basically a part of us and sixteen years is a pretty impressive stint.

He leaves behind a huge raft of fond memories; sunbathing on the pavement in front of the house, diving from the jetty into the river (but only if I dived in first), his obsession with cheese, joining me for my afternoon siesta, navigating our drives from the middle pad between the passenger and driver’s seat, rearranging the pillows on the bed so that he created the right nest for himself. He wasn’t perfect by any means. He was always rather affronted if another dog tried to sniff his bottom. He would cock his leg against picnic baskets on the beach, and he had a penchant for cat poo which didn’t do his breath any favours. Fairly recently he’d discovered how to pretty much climb inside the dishwasher (the Sparky pre-wash) and, in his dotage, it was best not to stroke him when he was sleeping if you wanted to keep your fingertips. But he was loved, and he gave enormous love in return.

It's easy to attach too much significance to his death. It comes at the same time as the children have all left home. They were all at primary school when we got him and now, they’re all adults. For me, too, he represents a constant in my own life which has chopped and changed quite a bit. My stay.

I feel enormously lucky and grateful to have had him as a pet and a friend.

Farewell, Sparky.

Two old men in a pub, one of them not happy that the crisps haven’t come yet

If you win a Razzie you walk away with a gold spray-painted raspberry worth $4.97. I say walk away, but (rudely) most nominees don’t show up for this ceremony. Brilliantly, and to their credit, some do and both Halle Berry and Sandra Bullock have gone up in my estimation for picking up their awards in person. Last year’s worst film winner – the slasher movie Winnie the Pooh; Blood and Honey – also acknowledged their victory. Class.

Shit awards have become an increasingly popular genre, sporting their own Wiki page. Some you may well have heard of. The Turnip Prize started out as an alternative to the Turner Prize for modern art. The prize itself is a turnip nailed to a plank of wood and it has a list of nominees each year as well as an overall winner. My favourite winner was the highly political ‘Party Gate’ in 2023, which consisted of a farm gate with a party hat stapled to it.

The Bad Sex Fiction Award has been run by the Literary Review since 1993. Its award winners have included Nick Cave and Morrissey suggesting, perhaps, that pop singers should stick to their lane. It’s worth having a read over some of the entries (no pun intended). This one, from Didier Decoin in 2019, was particularly fantastic.

‘Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono, a bulge that Miyuki seized, kneaded, massaged, squashed and crushed. With the fondling, Katsuro's penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Mikyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.’

The NME have been tagging on ‘worst’ awards to their annual ‘best’ list for years. Worst Band and Villain of the Year were a regular feature until recently (they seem to have gone all positive since Covid). James Blunt won worst album in 2006 for Back to Bedlam but was thrilled to finally receive his award years later, after doing an interview with the paper. But then, he is famous for roasting himself on social media, brilliantly defanging his critics.

The Darwin Awards, given to someone who has contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool by dying or becoming sterilised by their own actions, have even been made into a film. I was warmed to the story (pun definitely intended) of the patient in a hospital who decided to smoke a cigarette after being administered a highly flammable ointment in a hospital bed. I also liked the tale of the two burglars who decided to try and rob the house of Duncan Ferguson, the notoriously hard man of football not realising he was in. One burglar ended up in hospital for three days after his encounter with Big Dunc.

Some awards evolve into something genuinely meaningful. The Ig Noble awards began as an award for questionable science but have now become a prize for scientific research that makes people laugh and then think. John E. Mack and David M. Jacobs won the psychology prize for concluding that people who believe they were kidnapped by aliens probably were. Takebe Takanori won the physiology prize for discovering that pigs and other animals can absorb oxygen through the rectum. Sir Andre Geim won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for levitating a frog by magnetism.

My favourite alternative award ceremony has only happened once. The World’s Most Phallic Building Award took place in 2003. It was won by Ypsilanti Water Tower in Ypsilanti, Michigan (known by locals as Brick Dick). Photo below because it has to be shared. A proper award winner if ever there was one.

The highest number live in New York City (340k) which means that one in twenty four of the NYC population are millionaires. Not a bad ratio but pants compared to Monaco where half of its residents are millionaires. Half. Weirdly, the highest percentage of millionaires per capita when it comes to country is not Luxembourg or Dubai, where you might think, but Iceland. 20% of the population are millionaires, which makes sense if you’ve ever tried to buy a beer there.

It's always intriguing when you get these outliers, at least to your expectations (even if it then makes perfect sense when you discover why). Iceland is wealthy because of a strong economy, a very highly educated workforce, low energy costs because of its focus on renewables and its extortionate breweries (I made up that last one). Aberdeen, up until ten years ago, would regularly come in with an even higher concentration of millionaires per population than London. This was largely because of the oil fields located just offshore but also partly because of luck, literally (they have the highest number of lottery millionaires in the country).

I’m meandering down this particular rabbit hole because I’ve just come back from visiting a city in Mexico which, for about thirty years between the end of the 19^th century and the start of World War One, had the highest concentration of millionaires per capita in the world. Merida is a very typical Mexican city – a couple of large churches built by the Spanish conquistadors in the centre, a smattering of parks, a grid system of almost exclusively single storey buildings. It’s pretty and quite sleepy at the same time, though you get the sense that it’s just on the cusp of change. So, what were so many millionaires doing hanging out here?

The answer lies in a spiky plant found all over south Mexico, the henequen plant (or sisal, as its more commonly called) or ‘green gold’. This basically looks like a super-sized Yucca plant (Yucca as in Yucatan* I later realised with a doh) and if you pulp up the fibrous leaves, they can woven into very strong strands which, in turn, can be used for clothing, hammocks, ropes and sacks. It was this last that made the Merida millionaires’ fortune. On its doorstep was the world’s fastest growing economy – the US. Everything it was creating and making had to be sent either across the country or across the world and that needed sacking; coffee, cotton, sugar, corn. The Yucatan wasn’t the only place that grew sisal (named after the port of Sisal, north of Merida, where everything was shipped from), but the Americans decided to pitch a fight against the main rival grower (the Philippines) so Merida ended up with a monopoly.

The sisal was grown on plantations called haciendas which dotted the countryside around the city. There were once 2000 of these. Now, there are just a handful, most reclaimed by the jungle they were carved out of. Like every boom, the sisal bubble burst – conflict in the Yucatan between the Mayans and the Mexican government in the 20s and 30s didn’t help and then, by the 40s and 50s synthetic fibres and plastics took over. Very little sisal is still produced commercially now, and no haciendas cultivate it, although some have been turned into hotels and restaurants serving other millionaires.

*Random bit of etymology. When Hernandes de Cordoba landed here five hundred years before us, he asked the indigenous Mayans what the name of the place was. They replied ‘Yucatan’ which basically translates as ‘I have no idea what you’re asking me’ and so the name stuck.

Reaching number one was a massive achievement in the late seventies/early eighties. The chart was announced on Tuesday just in time for Top of the Pops to get its act together by Thursday. It was one of the few programmes that would draw everyone into the TV room, not least because you were guaranteed such an eclectic range of music that something would appeal to everyone. Just looking at the number ones from the time I arrived in school through to the end of 1980, we had some spiky Jam, a bit of classic Abba (Supertrouper), Barbara Streisand singing about being in love and The Police with their ‘Don’t Stand so close to me’ instructing a student to keep their distance from a deeply conflicted teacher. I fell in love with Blondie singing ‘The Tide is high’ before John Lennon’s ‘Starting Over’ got to Christmas number one before being toppled by the mighty St Winifred’s School Choir.

It was a vintage time for the charts and it’s no surprise that Top of the Pops has been such a rich seam to mine when it comes to TV nostalgia. The mainstream still dominated, but fringe and niche could still rise to the top if it resonated. In 1981 we had everything from Motown (Smokey Robinson), post-punk (Adam and the Ants), rockabilly (Shakin Stevens) and Eurovision (our triumphant Buck’s Fizz). And then came Ghost Town by The Specials.

The Specials had been formed in Coventry in the late seventies. From the pubs and clubs of the Midlands came a whole new sound that blended punk, pop, reggae and ska. The bands that came out of this world – The Specials, The Beat, The Selector – were a mix of black and white musicians and for a brief while they were all under the same label, the appropriately named Two Tone. The Specials had already tasted chart success with ‘Much too Young’ and the brilliant ‘Friday night, Saturday morning’, but a gruelling tour had taken them to the edge. Skinheads and the National Front would often start fights at the gigs and they were frequently broken up by police. The band were exhausted and disillusioned. Partly with each other (there were a lot of strong personalities jostling for space) but partly by the deprivation and despair of the places they visited. Towns hollowed out by the new government’s no-subsidy policy, shops shuttered up, clubs folding. It was this backdrop that inspired the lyrics to Ghost Town.

The music itself felt tight but then suddenly unleashed. A bit of rocksteady, a bit of ska, a whirligig of something almost North African in the chorus. Haunting commentary and then Terry Hall’s deadpan singing vocal. The video, with the band driving through deserted streets crammed into an old sixties Vauxhall was equally wild and claustrophobic at the same time. The song came out in June and steadily climbed the charts.

But what made Ghost Town so powerful was that it seemed to predict and then echo the unrest that swept through the country over the next few weeks. The day after it made it to number one police used CS gas for the first time on protestors in Liverpool. Over the next week, whilst it was blaring out on every radio, riots broke out in over twenty cities, the very Ghost Towns described in the shop. Chaos wasn’t limited to the riots. Minutes before going onto the set to perform Ghost Town on Top of the Pops, three of the band (including Terry Hall) announced that they were leaving. The Specials were no more.

The song is still incredibly powerful. The top music papers all voted it their best song of the year. Margaret Thatcher, reputedly, hated it. It manages to be deeply depressing and musically inspiring at the same time. A song about the break-up of a band that ended up being one of the finest protest songs of all.

I always wonder what it must be like to have extreme fame at a young age and then walk away from it. Child stars in films, teen pop sensations. They live and walk amongst us now, but the chances are we’d never recognise them and that’s exactly what they want, if it was their choice to step back from being known.

Marcus Sarjeant was only seventeen when he pulled out a gun and fired six shots at the Queen. It happened when she was Trooping the Colour, the ceremony where the monarch reviews the assembled regiments of the Household Division. It’s basically her birthday treat, or at least her ‘official’ birthday. As a child I was always so jealous of the fact that the Queen had two birthdays; the day she was born on, and then this extra one in June.

Sarjeant grew up in Kent. He seems to have been a big fan of uniforms; a member of Scouts, he graduated to the Air Training Corps before trying out for the Marines and then the army. He tried his luck with the police and the fire brigade before working at a zoo. At the time of the shooting, he was unemployed and living with his mother.

It's hard to tell whether his anti-royalist sentiments were the biggest factor or just the age-old desire to just become famous. Within the six months before the incident there’d been the killing of John Lennon, the attempt on Ronald Reagan and the shooting of the Pope. A friend of his said that at the time of John Hinckley Jr’s attempt on the life of Reagan, Sarjeant had said ‘I would like to be the first one to take a pot shot at the Queen.’

Sarjeant had a gun – his Dad’s old Webley revolver – but no ammunition, so he bought a couple of blank-firing replicas. In the run up to the Trooping of the Colour he sent a picture to a magazine with him holding his father’s gun and then a warning to Buckingham Palace which read, "Your Majesty. Don't go to the Trooping the Colour ceremony because there is an assassin set up to kill you, waiting just outside the palace". Thanks to the vagaries of the Royal Mail, this last one didn’t arrive until three days after the ceremony.

On the 13^th June 1981, as the Queen came riding past on her faithful horse, Burmese (who she rode for seventeen of the Trooping ceremonies), Sarjeant fired six blanks from his pistol. Looking at the footage, the horse is obviously spooked but the Queen, riding in that bizarre side saddle way, quickly brings him under control.

Sarjeant is quickly seized in a pincer movement between a soldier and a St John’s volunteer. There’s a sweet post-story about the St John’s man, John Heasman, who later, at a garden party in the palace, is summoned to meet the Queen, Prince Phillip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne. The Queen thanks him for what he did and then Prince Philip asks him to join them for refreshments. "They offered me a cup of tea,’ said Heasman, ‘but I was so dumbstruck I said, 'No thank you, I've just had some tea in the marquee outside.'

Heasman went on to be a first aid marshall at the funeral procession of the Queen forty-one years later.

Sarjeant was arrested and then tried under the Treason Act and given five years. He spent three years in prison and was released in October 1984 at the age of 20. He changed his name and began a new life.

Somewhere.

Whereas nuclear armageddon was an existential fear that appeared to be taking alarming reality in 1981, with the arrival of cruise missiles and Ronald Reagan, the IRA was a real fear that seemed to be receding from mainland UK. The bombing campaigns of the seventies – the Old Bailey, the terrible pub bombings at Guildford and Birmingham, the attacks on stations and London high streets – appeared to have dropped off. It didn’t stop the bleak items appearing on the news about continued deaths and injuries in Northern Ireland itself - car bombs, tit-for-tat reprisals, hijackings – but it all felt a very long way away and even the stories themselves were slipped in after the main UK headlines. The killing of Lord Mountbatten, the Queen’s cousin, when his fishing boat exploded in County Sligo, put the IRA front and centre in British consciousness, but 1979 and 1980 were comparatively quiet in terms of the IRA mainland campaigns. Of course, we weren’t to know this was just the eye of the storm. Within the next three years would come the Parks attacks, Harrods and then the Brighton bombing. But in 1981, the news was filled with stories about IRA prisoners rather than IRA attacks, and in particular, the hunger strikes.

The story goes back to 1972. Willie Whitelaw, the Home Secretary in Thatcher’s government in 1981, had been the Northern Ireland Secretary of State in Heath’s government. The year had begun with Bloody Sunday when Paratroopers opened fire on a catholic march killing thirteen people. Tensions were running very high and potential suspects were interned in large numbers in the Long Kesh prison just a few miles outside Belfast. Many internees were released, but those found guilty were given Special Category Status as political prisoners. This entitled them to the same rights as internees; free association, no uniforms, extra visits, food parcels. It was an attempt to try and take some of the heat out of the conflict.

By 1976, with a Labour government in power and the end of internment, the Special Category Status was ended. From now on, prisoners found guilty of violent offences or terrorism were to be treated as criminals, which meant an end to any ‘privileges’. Eight new prison blocks were built, shaped like an H from above and consequently called H-Blocks. The prison, formerly made up of Nissen huts, was now a proper long-term high-security detention centre and was named after the nearby hamlet, Maze. Maze Prison.

The protests by prisoners began almost immediately. They refused to wear the prison uniform, choosing instead to drape themselves in the blanket provided in each cell. By 1978, three hundred men were ‘on the blanket’. In March 1978, some prisoners refused to leave their cells claiming that when they did so they would be beaten and abused by prison officers before being thrown back in their cells. Instead of using showers or the toilets, they were given a hand basin instead. Their request for showers in the cells was turned down and when this happened they refused to use the hand basins. The blanket protest escalated into a ‘dirty protest’ as the prisoners refused to ‘slop out’ (empty their chamber pots) and instead smeared excrement on the walls to stop the spread of maggots.

The first hunger strike began in October 1980. This wasn’t the first hunger strike made by an IRA prisoner. Michael Gaughan had gone on strike in 1974 and Frank Stagg in 1976. Both men died. But this was the first in Northern Ireland. Initially Thatcher’s government refused to give in but then, in December, enough concessions were made for the strike to be called off.

But thinking that the prisoners wouldn’t start another strike, the government reverted to their previous stance. On March 1^st Bobby Sands, the leader of the Provisional IRA prisoners inside the Maze, began a second action, soon followed by others. What brought Bobby Sands to greater prominence was an unexpected by-election. The Fermanagh and South Tyrone seat became free when the sitting MP died of a heart attack. Bobby Sands was put forward as a candidate and, by just over a thousand votes, won. A convicted IRA man dying form a hunger strike was an MP. It was a pretty extraordinary turn of events.

Suddenly the hunger strikers became front page news. There was something about them, visually, that was very striking. These were young, bearded, emaciated men draped in blankets like Old Testament cloaks. No one said it at the time, but they looked like Jesus.

The government refused to give in and, on 5^th May, after sixty six days of hunger strike, Bobby Sands died. Over a 100,000 people attended his funeral in Belfast. And it didn’t stop there. Nine other hunger strikers died by the end of August.

The world’s attention had come back to the IRA.

On Sunday 18^th January, 1981, a fire broke out during a party at a house in New Cross, South East London. Thirteen people, aged between 14 and 22, died. All of them were black. Many felt at the time that the fire was deliberate. Racial tension in London was high and the National Front were active in the area. But the police investigation was inconclusive, and the tragedy soon dropped from the news.

But in neighbouring Brixton, it wasn’t forgotten. To many living in this vibrant but edgy bit of multicultural London, it was more proof that discrimination was endemic. Unemployment was high, but particularly so amongst the young black community. Crime was also high, and this was something that the Metropolitan police were determined to tackle. In early 1981 they launched a police operation called Operation Swamp 81. It appeared to be a clear reference to Margaret Thatcher’s use of the word in a 1978 TV interview when she said ‘people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’. Using the Vagabond Law from 1824, police could stop and search anyone who they thought were suspicious – hence the fact that this was nicknamed the ‘sus’ law. Overwhelmingly, the main target for this was young black men.

Following on from the New Cross Fire, a protest march had been organised by the activist, Darcus Howe from New Cross to Hyde Park, passing through Parliament Square. By and large the march was peaceful but there were some disturbances on Blackfriars Bridge. A photograph of a bloodied policeman was printed in the Evening Standard alongside Howe’s (entirely independent) comment, ‘It has been a good march’. Good incendiary stuff from the media.

The violence, when it did erupt in Brixton, happened because of the power of story. A black youth, Michael Bailey, was fleeing a group of others, having been stabbed. A police constable stopped him and attempted to staunch the blood. The boy was taken to a nearby cab rank and put into the back to take him to hospital but as the cab set off it was intercepted by a police car. Bailey was then bundled into the back of the police car to be treated by officers but the large crowd that had gathered thought he was being arrested and he was dragged out. The rumour soon went round that he’d died (he hadn’t). And that was all it took. Boom.

The riots began in the afternoon, bricks and bottles being thrown at the police. By the time darkness started to fall, the rioting had escalated. Shops were looted and buildings set on fire. A fire engine trying to attend to one of these was attacked. Cars were tipped over, police officers were injured, several badly.

By 9.30 over a thousand police were sent in. They were inadequately protected – their helmets offered limited protection and the plastic shields weren’t fireproof (something that was clearly clocked by the Met and addressed over the next few years in time for the Miner’s Strike) – but the sheer numbers subdued the rioters.

During the disturbances, 299 police were injured, along with at least 65 members of the public. 61 private vehicles and 56 police vehicles were destroyed. 28 premises were burned and another 117 damaged and looted. 82 arrests were made. In the immediate aftermath, Margaret Thatcher dismissed the idea that unemployment and racism had anything to do with the riots. ‘Nothing, but nothing, justifies what happened.’ Willie Whitelaw, the Home Secretary, commissioned Lord Scarman to investigate what had happened. His report, published in November 1981, acknowledged that there were a series of ‘complex political, social and economic factors (created a) disposition towards violent protest’ and this included the disproportionate and indiscriminate use of ‘stop and search’ powers. His recommendations, however, were largely ignored.

The Brixton Riot was deeply shocking, but the factors behind it weren’t unique. Unemployment, racial tensions, distrust of police. There were echoes all across cities up and down the country and in July this would explode.

Ronald Reagan was sixty nine days into his presidency when he was shot. At the age of seventy, he was the oldest man to have been elected president up until then, and this was seen as a very real weakness. His defeat of Jimmy Carter in the 1980 elections had been resounding and he was the poster boy for the new conservatives, with his anti-taxes/pro-market philosophy, but it was felt that he would be the battering ram for change, first through the door. He'd take the flak that came with change and others would follow in his wake when he had served out his term and retired – who’d vote for a seventy-four-year-old President? In effect, the bullet that nearly killed him probably won him another four years; his grace and bravery polished the brand ‘Reagan’ and created a bond between a president and his public that, regardless of politics, has rarely been matched.

Reagan had been a famous actor before going into politics. He’d begun as a Democrat, supporting Harry Truman and even being anti-nuclear, before drifting to the right. He headed up the Screen Actors Union and then became Governor of California in 1967. He lost out to Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination but was back in 1980. Carter had had a miserable time as US President, undone by the energy crisis, inflation and the humiliation of the hostage taking in Iran. Reagan seemed safer, stronger and savvier, but ultimately it was economics that won the race for him. ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ he asked. The answer for a sizeable majority of the population was no. Very strong echoes, then, of the 2024 election.

Every president was mindful of the danger he was in when out in public. Just a few days before the assassination attempt, Reagan had been to the Ford Theatre where Lincoln had been shot, and he’d mused privately how easy it was to be attacked if that’s what someone really wanted to do. Walking back to the presidential car after delivering a speech at the Washington Hilton, the proof of his fears was about to happen. John Hinkley Jr managed to breach the first cordon of police and the second cordon of secret service to find himself in the front row of a crowd of spectators, just a rope separating him from the president.

Hinckley was twenty-five. He was a deeply troubled young man and obsessed with the character Jodie Foster had played in the film, Taxi Driver. Having stalked the actress at Yale, where she’d gone on to be a student, and been rebuffed, he wanted to do something that got her attention. He’d trailed Jimmy Carter at various events and worked out how close he could get. The fact that Reagan was a different man didn’t count for much in his mind. He was still the President and killing the President would surely catch everyone’s notice.

He'd bought a gun from a pawn shop in Dallas just a few weeks earlier and no one had questioned why. He also bought bullets with an explosive tip. Again, absolutely no questions asked. As Reagan appeared from the hotel entrance, he dropped to his knee and fired off six bullets in less than two seconds.

The first shot hit James Brady, the White House Press secretary, in the head above his left eye. This was the only bullet that exploded, with devastating results. A police officer called Thomas Delahanty took the second shot, the bullet ricocheting off his spine. A spectator, standing near to Hinckley, began to wrestle him to the ground, sending the third shot high. Special Agent Jerry Parr grabbed Reagan by the shoulders and started to push him into the presidential limo.

Meanwhile – and remember, all this is happening in half seconds – another Secret Service agent, Tim McCarthy, put himself in the path of the crowd and the President. The fourth shot hit him in the stomach. The fifth shot slammed against the bullet-proof glass of the open door. The sixth hit the bodywork. The bullet didn’t explode (only one did) but it compressed to the size of a small coin on impact, ricocheted off the car and hit Reagan on the side of his ribcage, grazing a rib and then travelling through his body, piercing a lung and eventually stopping just an inch from his heart.

But no one knew he’d been hit. There wasn’t an obvious pool of blood. The bullet had pierced the side of Reagan’s dark jacket so it wasn’t obvious. But he was in a lot of pain. The assumption was that Parry’s rough handling of him, pushing him into the back seat of the limo might have cracked a rib. Parry gave the order to head back to the White House. But as he checked the President for any signs of injury, Reagan began to cough up bright, frothy coloured blood. If he’d just bitten his tongue, the blood would have been the usual dark red, but this was freshly oxygenated, so obviously from damage to his lungs.

Parry ordered the limo to divert to the nearest hospital, the George Washington. The limo pulled up and Reagan ignored the waiting stretcher insisting on walking. But as soon as he reached the corridor of the hospital he collapsed, his legs buckling and dropping to one knee. The fear was more that he was having a heart attack. He was rushed to theatre and there it was discovered what had happened, the puncture wound in the side of his chest only revealed once the suit had been cut away.

The operation to remove the bullet took nearly two hours and Reagan lost nearly half his blood, but it was successful, not least because, although he was seventy, he was fit and very healthy. Coming round from the operation, he had pulled his oxygen mask away from his face and said to the staff surrounding him, ‘I hope you are all Republicans.’ The operating doctor, Joseph Giordano (actually a Democrat) had replied, ‘Today, sir, we are all Republicans.’ Stories like this one were quickly fed back to the press and the legend (not untrue) of Reagan’s humour and grace despite the circumstances started to grow.

Within a couple of weeks, amazingly, Reagan was discharged and within four weeks he was back at work. Any suspicion of his age being a weakness was utterly dispelled. The other victims at the shooting had mixed experiences. Thomas Delahanty, the policeman, recovered but developed permanent nerve damage to his left arm which forced him to retire early. Tim McCarthy recovered fully but James Brady, who’d been hit by the one bullet that did explode, was permanently wheelchair-bound and his speech never quite recovered. When he died thirty three years later, the coroner’s verdict was homicide – it had been the injuries from his shooting that ultimately caused his death. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. During his trial, in an extraordinary and indefensible way, Jodie Foster was actually called as a witness. Ultimately she was able to submit a videotape rather than appear in person. After the trial, Hinckley wrote that the shooting was ‘the greatest love offering in the history of the world’, and he didn’t show any sign of regret. Hinckley was sent to psychiatric hospital. On September 10, 2016, he was allowed to leave the hospital to live with his mother full-time.

Two random post-scripts. The first was that when Reagan’s jacket was cut away, it was confiscated by the FBI who held onto it for the next two days. What they didn’t realise was the Gold Code – the code the President would need to punch into the nuclear football to trigger the launch of missiles – was in his wallet. So had the Soviets launched a nuclear attack, the US would have struggled to respond in time. The second thing is that, despite Reagan’s deep conservatism, the shooting brought him around to the whole idea of gun control. In an unlikely alliance, both Reagan and Bill Clinton pushed for tighter controls and, eventually, in 1993, The Brady Handgun Violence and Prevention Act (named after James Brady) instituted background checks and waiting periods for gun buyers. Much of this was rolled back later on, and it was riddled with loopholes, but there’s still an argument to say that the Act saved hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives.

The strongest union of all was the miners. Almost a quarter of a million men, battle hardened and very well organised, they had been the thorn in the side of Heath’s administration. They went on strike twice. The first time, in 1972, was short and sharp. It was the first official strike by the miners since the turmoil of 1926. Like a rogue firework, it suddenly spiralled out of control for the government. Flying pickets, led by local union leaders like Arthur Scargill, appeared at power stations and coke depots. Railway workers refused to transport coal, power station workers refused to handle it. The government quickly caved in. But the union, the NUM, weren’t finished yet. They came out on strike again in 1974 looking for a hefty pay increase. This time Heath tried to battle against them, bringing in the Three Day Week to ration power. Schools and businesses limped by but eventually Heath called a snap election. He clearly thought the shock of this would bring people to their senses and side with the government against the miners. But it failed. He was voted out and within the year, he was no longer leader of the Conservative Party.

It was humiliating. Humiliating for Heath, but also for members of his administration, like Margaret Thatcher, and it lit a spark in the minds of some Conservatives. How could the unions be defeated? Nicholas Ridley was one of these. He’d resigned from Heath’s government before the first strike, disappointed by Heath’s lack of ambition or fight. Ridley’s family had originally owned coal mines which had then been nationalised under Attlee in 1945, so there was an element of the personal here. But there was a philosophical dimension too. In his mind, the unions had grown too strong and too destructive. Something had to be done to bring them under control and if they were going to act like an army, then the plan to tackle them had to be like a military campaign.

In 1977, Ridley presented his plan to the new leader of the Conservatives, Margaret Thatcher. It was multi-stranded. Store up reserves of coal, import more from abroad, draw up legislation to outlaw flying pickets, create a non-unionised transport system, build more oil-fired power stations so that there was less dependence on coal. And, taking the military concept to the next level, train up the police to be able to take the fight to the strikers, quite literally; equip them with the right gear, school them in the right tactics to take on unruly, but often undisciplined, crowds.

In 1980, Thatcher brought in the Coal Industry Act. Echoing what she had done with a range of other heavy industries – steel, shipbuilding, etc - she slashed the subsidies from the government. The idea was for industry to stand on its own two feet in the market place. If it could, good, if it couldn’t, let it die. In the case of coal, the Coal Board, the nationalised company that ran the mines, realised that that meant closing a large number of unprofitable pits. Plans were drawn up to do this and, quite naturally, the union were against it. Led by the wily veteran Joe Gormley they called a strike.

Thatcher knew that she wasn’t ready. The Ridley Plan was uncooked and she had no option but to cave in. Crisis talks were called with the union and concessions made. Imports of coal were to be reduced, subsidies restored to the coal board and the twenty three pits ear-marked for closure were to remain open. For the lady who was not for turning, it was a massive U-turn. But it was also a calculated one. Gormley, widely respected in the general public, was retiring. In his place, Arthur Scargill, a self-confessed Marxist firebrand, was to become the new general secretary. Within a few more years, everything else on the plan would be in place, not least a highly trained Met riot police force. It was worth swallowing the temporary humiliation because in time she’d be back spitting fire. And, sure enough, in 1984, that’s exactly what she did. Round two was going to be a very different battle.

If you’re in Germany or France, the political balance of newspapers is pretty even. Le Figaro is conservative, but Le Monde is liberal. Bild is Centre Right, Suddeutsche Zeitung centre left. By the time you add in all the smaller titles it all seems to even out. British papers, on the other hand, are far more skewed to the right. It’s probably (if not scientifically) fair to say that 80% of newspaper circulation in this country is right of centre. Some papers have always had a traditional stance – the Daily Telegraph has always been conservative with both a small and big ‘c’, The Guardian always liberal since it’s non-conformist Manchester days. The biggest change over the past forty off years has been the Times, which publishes the daily newspaper and the biggest selling broadsheet of all, The Sunday Times. Formerly the bastion of independent journalism, 81% of the population now believe The Times/Sunday Times to be right wing. And one of the biggest reasons why? Because it’s owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Back at the start of 1981 Murdoch was already a big player in British media. He owned the biggest selling daily, The Sun, and the biggest selling Sunday newspaper, The News of the World. But these were both tabloids, or ‘red tops’ known because of the colour of the masthead. He was desperate to break into the serious broadsheet world and suddenly the jewel in the British media crown, The Times, became available.

One of Britain’s oldest and most admired newspapers, The Times was owned by a Canadian media magnate, Roy Thomson. He’d allowed it to keep its editorial independence, but his struggle had not been with the journalists but with the print unions. His refusal to yield to their demands led to a dispute which lasted for nearly a year from 1978 to 1979. That meant no Times on the newsagents shelves for twelve months. Eventually, rather than cave in, Thomson decided he was going to sell the paper.

There were several suitors. A group of journalists from within the paper put together a bid. Robert Maxwell, owner of the Daily Mirror and future drainer of its pension fund, was interested. Tiny Lonhro, who’d made his money from mining in Africa, wanted to buy a paper (and respectability -he did end up acquiring The Observer). Murdoch was seen as a serious bidder but with one big drawback. Because he owned two papers already, taking over The Times/Sunday Times, would effectively give him 40% of the readership. It would have to be referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission who would, most likely, ask him to divest of one of his existing titles.

So, Murdoch made a secret visit to Chequers in early January, 1981, to meet with Margaret Thatcher. I say secret because for the next thirty years both Murdoch and Thatcher strongly denied any meeting had taken place. There was no official record, nothing in the national archives. What has been found since is the briefest of notes from Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s press secretary (he of the amazing eyebrows). This was filed away in a Downing Street file marked ‘Commercial – In Confidence.’ Thatcher couldn’t be seen to meet with someone who had such a vested interest in buying the paper, not could her ministers know.

There’s no narrative of the conversation they had, but the events that followed afterwards give a pretty clear suggestion of what was covered. Outwardly, Murdoch had promised to maintain the independence of the editorial team, strike a compromise with the unions and start to upgrade the way the paper was actually being produced without any significant job losses. All of these he went on to break within a few years of taking ownership, but no action was taken against him.

Thatcher, on her part, came away from the meeting with the decision to make a mini-reshuffle in her cabinet (an unusual thing to do in January). The business-savvy John Nott, her Trade Minister and therefore the man who would decide on whether something was referred to the Monopolies and Merger’s Commission, was moved up to Defence. In his place, the much more rural, old-style Tory, John Biffen, was made Trade. He was a fundamentally decent man but known to agonise over decisions. He clearly had very little grasp of what was going on, but the clock was ticking fast. Having been fed some rather dubious figures about the financial health of The Times and, especially questionable, The Sunday Times, he decided that this justified bypassing the MMC. Too many jobs would be lost if time was frittered away. Instead, he recommended that the sale to Murdoch should go ahead.

A stitch up? Harold Evans, the former editor of The Times later sacked by Murdoch, thought so. Thatcher was in a very challenging position; the SDP looked like they might turn into a very credible opposition, she was facing rebellion on her own back benches from Ted Heath and his supporters. Her experiment to modernise Britain (something Murdoch wanted, and succeeded to do, with the way newspapers were printed) was looking very precarious. Having a cheerleader in the tabloids and a major broadsheet was very necessary. And in return….well, look around you now. The power of endorsement, the phone hacking scandals, the bullying, the sleaze, Prince Harry’s recent case/settlement. Did it all start with this?

For my generation, the shooting of John Lennon was our JFK moment, in the same way that Diana’s death was for the generation after. He was killed outside his apartment block, The Dakota, in New York on December 8^th. He was just forty years old.

I remember walking along the corridor to the dining hall. There was an old-fashioned radio in the common room beside the dining hall, a heavy wooden slab that sat on its own legs and lit up like the cockpit of a plane when you switched it on. It was playing ‘Imagine’ and either one of the boys in the room was talking about John Lennon’s death or the presenter mentioned it at the start of the song.

Initially, it didn’t feel particularly relevant to my world. I knew that Lennon was one of the Beatles, that they’d split up pretty much when I was born (no obvious connection as far as I knew), that he was married to Yoko Ono. That was about it. He wasn’t part of my musical world and, up until a month earlier, hadn’t released anything for five years. But I was aware of the significance. He represented something, another world, a more idealistic world. The pictures in the papers showed crowds gathering for vigils in New York and Liverpool, hundreds, thousands of people standing in silence holding banners. And then there was the song. ‘Imagine’ is the perfect combination of melancholy minor chords and hope, however naïve. Stripped back, simple, emotive. The ideal elegy.

The 1970s had been, in their own way, as dramatic as the 1960s for Lennon. The decade began with the love-in in Amsterdam, Lennon and Ono’s anti-war demonstration conducted from a bed in the Hilton Hotel. Lennon’s early solo output was powerful if uncomfortable as well. ‘Mother’, his song about abandonment and rejection, began with tolling funeral bells and ended with one of the most painful screams committed to vinyl. He and Yoko embraced radical left politics and ‘Give peace a chance’ and ‘Happy Xmas (War is over)’ were defiantly pitched at the US conflict in Vietnam. It began a long, protracted period of the American authorities trying to deport Lennon – Nixon hated him.

His beef wasn’t just with the ruling classes. The split from the other Beatles had been messy and unresolved. He and McCartney sniped at each other in song and interviews, and Lennon was upset when George Harrison refused to allow Yoko to join the Concert for Bangladesh that Harrison had organised. Commercial success seemed to become increasingly elusive and in 1973 saw the start of what Lennon later called his ‘Lost Weekend’. He and Yoko split and he turned to drink and drugs on a much heavier level. It was his drunken antics with other musicians like Harry Nilsson rather than his music that made headlines. He took up with his former assistant, May Pang, and whilst he achieved chart success working with others (Elton John and David Bowie, with whom he wrote ‘Fame’), his solo work was patchy and critically panned.

In 1975 he got back together with Yoko and their son, Sean, was born in the same year. Lennon effectively retired from music to become a house husband, raising Sean and baking bread. The deportation dispute was resolved and Lennon settled into comfortable, settled life in New York City. It was only in 1980 that he and Yoko decided to step back into music, recording the album Double Fantasy. The first single from the album, ‘(Just like) Starting Over’, came out in October, 1980.

The photos of Lennon from this last year show a fit-looking, happy man, a long contrast from the puffy-faced, angry figure of the mid-seventies. Whether in the recording studio or simply walking the streets with Yoko, he looks content, settled. And cool. He has traded the famous circular metal glasses for a pair of designer sunglasses, he is clean shaven, his hair either pulled back into a ponytail or allowed to fall to his shoulders. He was happy – happy to be photographed in the street, happy to sign autographs.

The last photo taken of him shows him doing exactly that; signing his latest album for a fan, who looks on, smiling, thrilled. The man is Mark Chapman. A few hours later he will return to the same spot and shoot Lennon five times. Chapman made no attempt to escape and was arrested immediately at the scene. Lennon was dead by the time the ambulance arrived at the Roosevelt Hospital.

For the next two months, the airwaves were dominated by Lennon’s music. ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ went straight to number one and Double Fantasy topped the charts in the UK and the US. Starting Over was knocked off its perch by the saccharine novelty of St Winnifred’s School Choir singing ‘Grandma’, edging ‘Happy Xmas’ into the number two slot, only for ‘Imagine’ to then go to number one in January. This was succeeded by ‘Woman’, the second single from Double Fantasy. Another ridiculous novelty record – Joe Dolce’s ‘Shaddupa ya face’ - briefly made it to number one before this was toppled by Roxy Music’s version of Lennon’s ‘Jealous Guy.’ It felt like a perfect reflection of the British public; wanting to mourn one of their great heroes but occasionally distracted by tat.

Years later, like many others, I had my own Lennon phase; pretending to get angry to ‘Working Class Hero’ and wearing the same National Health glasses. I’m not sure I ever really got the measure of this complicated, difficult man but I did feel part of a collective mourning process.

The last photo taken of John Lennon. Chapman is the man on the right.

In an era before twenty-four hour news and the internet, newspapers were the biggest window on the world around. You might catch a snatch of headlines from the radio, but the early evening news on TV clashed with tea time and the late news was at 9pm – too late for us first years. Three papers were brought to the house each day and they started off in the senior common room (with the sixth form), before migrating to the middle common room (the fourth and fifth years) and then, rarely intact, they ended up in the junior common room (for first, second and third years). They’d often be a day old, so news arrived on a time lag. I think The Times was the broadsheet and the Mail and Express the tabloids. Then, as now, these latter two were very good at shouting out hysterical headlines and, for the first few months of being at school, it felt like every other day was a story about the Yorkshire Ripper.

Between late August and November he attacked five times. Three of the women survived, despite being savagely beaten, but two women died. None of these women were sex workers, despite the association the press and police had made between the killer and his victims. Two were students, one a doctor, one a civil servant and the last a sixteen year old girl simply walking to the shops. He’d started his awful spree in 1975 and by the end of 1980 it was reckoned that he’d killed thirteen women and attacked at least seven. The assaults had taken place all over the north of England, but predominantly in Yorkshire, hence the first part of his nickname. The last part echoed the infamous Jack the Ripper who butchered the bodies of his victims in a similar way.

As a kid, reading about these stories, it was simultaneously compelling and utterly petrifying. The fact that it was happening in the ‘North’ just added to the whole narrative. This was something inconceivably violent and brutal taking place in a hard, unforgiving part of the country. The North/South divide felt very real. The South was where the soft and hard power lay; Westminster, the City, Buckingham Palace. We only heard Southern accents on the radio or the television. The North had factories and football, except, increasingly it seemed, just the latter. Unless you had family who lived in the North, there was no reason to head that way; besides, cars were too unreliable and trains took too long. The Yorkshire Ripper murders felt like something that could only happen in these bleak, Northern towns, at least, that’s how the papers told it.

We were told as well that the police investigation was bigger than anything that had ever happened before. Thirty thousand interview statements, hundreds of thousands of names, millions of number plates. And all stored on handwritten index cards. Apparently the floor at the Leeds police station had to be reinforced to cope with the weight of all these cards, stacked up in endless cardboard boxes. Cross-referencing anything took an age and the Ripper was so prolific that information just kept on coming.

The eventual perpetrator, a truck driver called Peter Sutcliffe, was actually called in nine times. His number plate was noted over sixty times in red light districts where the Ripper was known to have operated. His one-time friend, Trevor Birdsall, who had been the unwitting getaway driver at possibly his first ever assault on a woman way back in 1969, had written to the investigation team naming Sutcliffe and giving an address, but his letter ended up not being found until after Sutcliffe’s arrest. The system was just too clogged up to cope. Human error also played a huge part. A hoax tape recording, sent to George Oldfield, the chief investigating officer, by a man with a Sunderland accent claiming to be the Ripper, totally blindsided the top team. In a classic case of confirmation bias, they ignored all the evidence, including from victims who’d survived, that the murderer had a Yorkshire accent. It derailed the investigation by over a year.

Sutcliffe often escaped thanks to alibis from his wife, Sonia. When more substantial evidence was found, police just couldn’t quite put together a tight enough case. A new five pound note in the handbag of one of his victims that he’d handed over earlier in the evening was traced back to the haulage firm that employed him. The fact that it could have been passed onto him as part of his wages, and that he’d already been interviewed as a suspect, should have rung every alarm bell but it didn’t. His colleagues at work even called him the Ripper as a joke. The investigation was farcical but utterly tragic too.

In the end, despite the letter naming him sitting there somewhere amongst the boxes, it was just sheer luck that he was caught. He was stopped driving away from a red light district with false number plates. He had picked up a sex worker, Olivia Reivers. The police asked him what his passenger’s name was; Sutcliffe admitted he didn’t know. The police decided to take him in for questioning but, before they went back to the station, Sutcliffe claimed that he was desperate for a pee. He went behind a wall and then returned. It was only on an unfounded hunch that one of the arresting officers went back the next day and found a hammer, rope and a knife that Sutcliffe had stashed away. Another knife was found hidden in the cistern at the police station.

Sutcliffe confessed to everything two days later. He was brought to trial and sentenced to twenty consecutive life sentences. He spent time in Broadmoor Hospital, alongside Charles Bronson and Ronnie Kray, before being transferred to a prison in Northumberland. He died in November 2020 after contracting Covid.

One of the most forgotten chapters is that of a man who ended up serving nearly twenty five years in prison for a murder that was almost certainly carried out by Sutcliffe. Anthony Steel was convicted for the murder of Carol Wilkinson, a woman known to Sutcliffe, who had also been seen in the area where the murder took placed. Steel had pleaded guilty having been told by the police that this was the only way he’d get a solicitor. He was eventually freed in 2003 after it was found that his low IQ and mental capabilities made him a vulnerable interviewee, discrediting his confession.

The whole story is run through with deep sadness as well as horror. It’s true that a majority of the Ripper’s victims were sex workers, but the stories behind why they ended up being there at the wrong place and wrong time took time to emerge. The Ripper’s first victim, Wilma Mary McCann was a mother of four who had fallen on hard times and was just trying to fend for her young family. Emily Monica Jackson, murdered by the Ripper in January 1976, was sleeping with men to try and help save her husband’s failing roofing business. The victims who survived and who weren’t sex workers then had to face a second assault in terms of suspicion from the press and even family. It was a simplistic equation to say that this was about a killer driven by a voice telling him to kill women who had sinned, and yet that’s exactly what the papers did. And possibly, still do.

Looking back, Maggie seems like an unstoppable force. Everything came together in one perfect storm. Consensus politics - the agreement between the two main parties that the state should dictate how the country was run - was broken. The turbulence of the seventies, with its oil crises, blackouts and punk rock, had to give way to something different. And Margaret Thatcher seemed to represent that in where she’d come from, how she looked, what she said. The blue suits, the coiffed hair, the handbags, the strained vowels; she was a publicist’s dream. She wasn’t the first powerful woman in British politics – Barbara Castle had set the mould – but she took it to a whole new level.

And yet there’d been very few signs when she first became leader of the party in 1975 that she would be so singular and distinctive as a politician. She’d been a solid Secretary of State for Education in the Ted Heath administration, continuing the momentum of closing down grammar schools and being brave/foolish enough to end free school milk, an action which won her the brilliant title of ‘Thatcher the Milk Snatcher’. She’d campaigned for staying in Europe in the 1975 referendum and she surrounded herself with solid, centrist politicians in her shadow cabinet.

But behind the scenes was an almost evangelical shift in philosophy. Most of the dominant politicians of the post-war years all subscribed to the same core ethos; that everything should be done to close the gap between the richest and the poorest. The interwar years, with all their instability and political extremism, were a lesson to be learnt from. Not for nothing was this era called the ’Great Compression’. The difference between Labour and the Conservatives when it came to housing or nationalised industries or education was minimal. But this was all about to change. There was an alternative school of thought, economically and philosophically. Fuelled by writers like Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek and economists like Milton Friedman, this was all about liberating the individual and the economy as a whole. What this meant in practice was low taxes, less state and more private ownership. People should be able to own their own homes, rather than rely on the council for housing. Industries shouldn’t be propped up by taxpayers’ money anymore - if they were meant to survive, the market would decide on their future. Personal choice was more important than collective decisions. Rather than tax the wealthiest to fund the state, everything that was possible to grow wealth should be encouraged. The rich might grow richer, but it would make the wheels of the economy turn faster and that wealth would trickle down to benefit everyone. This was the new libertarian approach, or neo-liberalism.

When Thatcher was elected, she started to implement her changes straight away. Deflationary policies and her monetarist approach started to see inflation coming down, but at the expense of unemployment which began to rise steeply. Deregulation began in the City, but heavy industry was hit hard as the state subsidies vanished – coal mining, shipyards, steel. Whole communities suddenly found themselves hollowed out as the government stopped supporting the industry they were built on. The Right to Buy scheme allowed long term tenants to buy their council house but social housing for nurses/fire brigade/police ended. The economy as a whole slid into recession, with the GDP falling below zero.

This was the backdrop, then, to Thatcher’s first Conservative Party conference since becoming Prime Minister. She was deeply unpopular across whole swathes of the country (especially in Scotland and the north where a lot of the heavy industry was based). But she also faced a lot of opposition from within her own party, particularly from the old Conservative guard, not least the man she’d taken over from, Ted Heath. There was a lot of pressure to reflate instead of deflate, get the economy growing instead of shrinking. In other words, to do a U-Turn.

Thatcher was determined to stick to her guns – her greatest strength and, arguably, her greatest weakness – and her speech to a nervous conference was the best way to do it. She’d had a playwright, Ronald Millar, write her speeches since the mid-seventies and he came up with a line, ‘You turn if you want to….the lady’s not for turning.’ It was a neat, clever play on words but apparently Margaret Thatcher just couldn’t understand the joke in the first part and, when she delivered her line, it was the last section that she emphasised. For the listening party faithful, it was exactly what they wanted to hear, and they rewarded it with a five minute standing ovation. Arguably, it was the line that saved her premiership.

The detente of the 1970s had crumbled and the invasion of Afghanistan by Russia in 1979 prompted the usually mild-mannered US president, Jimmy Carter, to boycott the Americans from going to the Moscow Olympics. The election of Ronald Reagan as president cranked things up a whole extra gear. When the Soviets announced they were going to put their new SS20 missiles in Eastern Europe close to the borders of the West, Reagan and NATO declared that they would station Cruise and Pershing missiles in various European countries, including the UK. Suddenly all the sabre rattling (or ‘Megaphone Diplomacy’ as the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, called it) made for a very jittery status quo.

In a quirk of geography, Reading was just a few miles north of Burghfield, where the assembling and weaponizing of the new Trident nuclear missiles took place, and just ten miles east of Aldermaston, the headquarters of Britain’s nuclear research. In the line up of Soviet targets for an early missile strike in the UK, these were easily in the top ten. So that was goodbye Reading. I had a friend down the road from where I lived who had a proper nuclear bunker complete with tinned goods and board games all ready for Armageddon. We were all quite jealous of him.

Just a few miles further down the motorway was Greenham Common, an airbase that had been chosen by the Americans as one of the UK bases for the new Cruise missiles. It was an obvious place then for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) to mount a big demonstration. CND had been formed back in the 1950s with the writer Bertrand Russell as its president. With the Cold War threatening to get hot around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, their marches from London to Aldermaston (and then in reverse) were huge. But as the perceived threat receded, so they slipped into the background. Now, horribly relevant again, their membership surged and their symbol appeared everywhere. I tried to draw it onto my pencil case only to discover I’d drawn the Mercedes insignia. Easy to rectify but a small death of shame.

Greenham Common made it back into the headlines a year or so later when the first women’s group set up camp outside the perimeter fence. For an astonishing nineteen years these tenacious, brave women kept up a vigil, occasionally mounting actions against the base. Two hundred women dressed as teddy bears clambered over the barbed wire fence and entered the base for a picnic, dancing on the missile silos. In 1983 CND were back, organising an amazing 14-mile human chain of 70,000 people linking Burghfield, Aldermaston and Greenham. A few months later 50,000 women circled the base, just after the arrival of the first cruise missiles. The event, called ‘Reflect the Base’ started as a silent vigil with the women holding up mirrors to reflect the base to itself. By the end of the day, the day turned a little less symbolic and more direct action as the fences were cut and hundreds of women tried to get into the base itself. By all accounts, the policing was pretty brutal in response.

Despite all of this happening just a few miles away, the only way we accessed news was on the TV or in papers, and the way the women were portrayed was as loopy extremists tying tampons to the fences and abandoning their families to protest. Any large group of people who feel passionate about something is going to have its share of extremes, but looking back, it was an amazing feat of endurance and belief. Appropriately enough, when the missiles were finally shipped out and the airbase was decommissioned, the old camp was inaugurated as a Commemorative and Historic Site in 2002. It's nice to think that amidst all this talk of war and conflict, perhaps it was the women who actually won.

Poland in 1980 was struggling. It was very much an Eastern Bloc country, but it occupied a slightly different place than its other communist neighbours. It was allowed to trade with the west and it was a popular tourist destination for Comecon countries. It was also fiercely catholic (the new Pope, John Paul 2, was Polish), in sharp contrast to the official atheism of most Soviet-bloc countries. But the downturn of the world economy hit Poland hard. GDP started to fall and food prices surged, in some cases by over 100%. This led to a brittle atmosphere of unrest within the country. The shipyard workers in Gdansk had a tradition of kicking off. It was their protest in 1970 that had brought down the Gromulka government, albeit at the cost of dozens of deaths amongst the workers. Now there was a real fear that it might happen again. The authorities tried to pre-empt this by singling out the trouble makers and getting rid of them. Lech Walesa was one of these. An electrician in the shipyard, he’d been sacked the year before. Inside the shipyard, his close friend and veteran union activist, Anna Walentynowicz, a crane operator, was also targeted. With just a few months left before she retired, she was dismissed. This meant that she was denied her pension despite all her years of service. It was the spark that lit the tinder box. Walesa literally climbed over the shipyard walls (he wasn’t allowed through the gates) to call out the workers in support of his friend. Within a matter of hours, the shipyard was at a standstill, twelve thousand workers downing tools in solidarity.

And so, the union bearing the same name was born. The government, looking to appease the workers, allowed Solidarity to become an official trade union and within a matter of months the membership had risen to the millions. As a rather confused eleven year old, I couldn’t quite grasp the contradiction that a union formed by the workers was something that the communists (who were all about the workers) didn’t want. In January, there were reports of Soviet tanks on the border. It looked very much as if a repeat of 1970, and perhaps 1956 with the crushed uprisings in Budapest and East Berlin, was going to take place.

In the end, the Russians decided that it wasn’t worth it. They were bogged down in Afghanistan and the economic hit would be devastating if harsh sanctions followed. The harsh martial law imposed by General Jaruzelski in 1982 crushed the strikes and his outlawing of Solidarity sent the movement underground. But despite solving the immediate crisis, the damage had already been done. Solidarity had shown that a strong, anti-authority movement was possible and very popular. The emotions that it had stirred and the personalities it had created weren’t going to go away, and sure enough in 1989 it was a renewed Solidarity that took on the communist government and spearheaded its fall from power. Elections were held in Poland on 4 June 1989 – five months before the fall of the Berlin Wall - in which the opposition was allowed to field candidates against the Communist party; the first free elections in any Soviet bloc country. Lech Walesa went on to serve as Polish President between 1990 and 1995.

Walentynowicz went back to her job, finally retiring from the shipyard in 1991. Her friendship with Walesa which, you could argue, lay behind the formation of Solidarity, didn’t survive the new order of things. They were two stubborn people with very strong views, and she wasn’t afraid of criticising his thinking. She left the union. But when it came to selecting someone to represent the trade unions and workers in the memorial service at Katyn, she was the obvious choice. And the rest, tragically, is history.

Anna Walentynowicz flanked by Lech Walesa at the Gdansk shipyards

Growing up in the pre-internet, news filtered into our lives almost like osmosis. We got the direct shots from the brilliant John Craven’s Newsround, but, on the whole, it was mainly about pandas from London Zoo being shipped off to other zoos around the world to be impregnated (it never happened, poor Chia Chia). It was also used as the pee-break/toast making part of the children’s TV schedule so some of the bigger stuff might have slipped past. There was the newspaper a huge, unwieldy thing with black and white photos and newsprint that came off on your fingers. And then there was the radio, always on in the kitchen or the car. Unless it was something massive – for some reason Elvis’s death was one of these – it never felt particularly relevant or even real. But at some point around the age of ten I started to become more aware of events. I’m sure it’s a known stage of child development, opening up to a world beyond the immediate. It’s also extraordinarily formative; you’re rooting yourself in place and time, trying to join the dots from what’s happening in the bigger world to your own small corner. Three things happened in the space of three months that gave me a very strong sense of Britishness, possibly in a slightly overegged way, but still deeply significant.

On April 30, gunmen stormed the Iranian embassy in London, just down from the Albert Hall. In my head they were always conflated with the Islamic extremists who had toppled the Shah in Iran and taken fifty two Americans hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran. It’s an obvious parallel to draw. Actually, they were a small band of Iranian Arabs campaigning for sovereignty of a region called Khuzestan province. They were against the same bad guys – that’s inevitably how you saw news as a ten year old; there were good guys and bad guys. Right things and wrong things. But that wasn’t appreciated at the time. Basically, they were ‘bad guys’ who had taken innocent people hostage including a handful of Brits. After some protracted negotiations which saw some hostages released but one hostage shot and bundled out of the building, the SAS stormed the embassy. It was all on live television, these black-clad balaclava-wearing men abseiling in through windows and blowing up the skylight to lower themselves into the embassy. In the course of the next seventeen minutes, all but one of the hostages was saved and five out of the six terrorists were killed. It was an extraordinary feat of logistics (they’d built a replica of much of the embassy using cardboard and wood to practice on) and bravery, and it launched this otherwise fairly secret army group, the Special Air Service, into public consciousness. For a ten year old boy it was like seeing Commando comic come to life.

In June, an English team lifted the European Cup for the fourth year in a row. Except this team wasn’t Liverpool, who everyone in my school supported. This was Nottingham Forest, winning for the second year, edging out Kevin Keegan’s Hamburg. Forest were managed by the charismatic, if perpetually controversial, Brian Clough. They contained England’s first million pound footballer, Trevor Francis, who had scored the goal that was to win them the European Cup the year before. Astonishingly, an English club was to triumph in the European Cup seven times in the eight years between 1977 and 1984. This was club football, though, with teams made up of players from all the home countries and Ireland. The reality on an international level was that England had failed to qualify for the either of the World Cups in the 1970s. Our world ranking in 1980 was well out of the top ten, but I didn’t need to know that. We’d won again in Europe, therefore we must be the best.

In July the Olympics began in Moscow. These games were famous for the American boycott. Objecting to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the American president, Jimmy Carter, decided to pull the US team from competing (much to the massive disappointment of a lot of US athletes who’d been training to reach their peak in Moscow). In all, sixty five other countries followed suite, including Canada, China, Japan and West Germany. It wasn’t the first time the games had been boycotted. The previous games in 1976 had been boycotted by twenty eight African countries in protest at New Zealand allowing a rugby team to tour South Africa, then under sanctions from the rest of the sporting world because of their apartheid regime. But the impact in 1980 was huge. There was quite a lot of pressure on Great Britain to join its Atlantic partner, but the Olympic committee here stuck to its guns and pressed ahead. And because they did, we ended up winning five golds. We had the fastest man in the world (Allan Wells), the best middle-distance runners (Steve Ovett and Seb Coe), the best all round sportsman in the world (Daley Thompson in the decathlon) and the baldest (Duncan Goodhew in the 100m breaststroke). We also had the world’s strongest man – or so he was to become – Geoff Capes, but he ended up getting fifth in the shot put. The fact that none of them had American competition sailed past me.

So that was best soldiers. Best footballers. Best athletes. What a time to be British.

Poor barren Chia Chia

‘Just do it! Huh?’ Josh said manically, ‘Just bloody do it! Who’s more rock’n’roll now?’

He grabbed Mikey by his jacket lapels and gave him a shake.

Josh’s eyes were buzzing but there was something else too. They were huge. It was like Maradona at the ’94 World Cup. He was totally wired. Two and two suddenly made a crashing four in Mikey’s head.

‘Josh, have you taken something?’ he asked.

Josh gave a playful shrug.

‘I found some poppers in my pocket. That Groucho Club doesn’t stop giving, does it.’

‘How many did you take?’ asked Mikey, trying to keep his voice as flat as possible, but already knowing the answer.

‘All of them,’ said Josh as the lift reached the bottom of the shaft with a small judder.

The Japanese family stayed rooted to their spot in the corner as if they’d been turned into stone, which, judging by their pale faces, they may have been. Josh literally bounced out of the lift and started skipping round the corner towards the Westbound platform.

Mikey took a deep breath and followed him out, turning left as well. When he reached the platform, he noticed three things; One, it was virtually empty, which was a relief. Two, Josh was skipping furiously down towards the far end as if he’d just scored a goal in a cup final. Three, someone seemed to have replaced his own feet with two lumps of lead. He knew he had to get to Josh, but he just couldn’t move. He leaned back against the advertising hoarding and felt his eyelids start to flicker.

‘Come on, Mikey, hold it together,’ he said to himself.

Josh had reached the far end of the track and was now careering back up the platform, his skip now a sprint. He came to a sudden halt in front of Mikey.

‘C’mon. I’ll race you. You can have a head start because you’re old.’

Mikey frowned.

‘Whoops,’ said Josh, touching his lips with his hand, ‘I didn’t mean to say that. I wasn’t trying to be rude.’

Mikey tried to move his hands away from the wall but these now seemed to be stuck fast as well. Every bit of his conscious brain was trying to fight the associations triggering off like fireworks in his head; the smell of stale air, the claustrophobia of the curved ceiling, the brutal greyness of the tracks.

‘Josh, stop! Listen to me! We need to get you to a doctor.’

‘Why?’ said Josh, ‘I’m not sick. Look, a sick man couldn’t do this.’

He started to walk away along the yellow line on the edge of the platform as if it was a tightrope, his arms out to the side.

‘Josh!’ Mikey raised his voice, not wanting to shock him with a shout, ‘You’ve taken too many drugs. We need to get you to hospital.’

‘But they were only poppers,’ said Josh, continuing his tightrope walk.

‘No they weren’t,’ said Mikey, having a sudden flashback to his deal with Jake.

‘This is hardcore shit,’ was his eloquent description of what he gave him.

‘They were a lot more powerful than poppers. You’re OD-ing, Josh. I know you don’t feel it right now, but you are. Any moment you’re going to crash.’

‘How do you know?’ said Josh.

He swung around.

Perhaps it was just losing balance. Maybe it was the drugs kicking in. It might have been the gust of air as the train screamed into the station. Chances are it was probably all three. Mikey managed to wrench a hand away from the side and reach as far forward to Josh as he could. In his mind he thought Josh was reaching out a hand too, but that bit might have been invented. What wasn’t was the look of confusion and realisation that swept across Josh’s face in that final fragment of time.

‘How do you know?’

And then he fell.

The receptionist gave a fleeting flicker of recognition this time, but then who wouldn’t have recognised him. His face was on every paper, alongside one of Josh that made him look about seventeen.

Mikey took the lift up to the top floor.

Mitch was behind his desk but a familiar looking tall man in a black uniform sat in the chair in front of him. He stood up as Mikey walked out of the lift;

‘Mikey, Mikey, this is Deputy Chief Intendent Davis.’

‘Superintendent,’ the policeman corrected, ‘And we’ve met before. Hello, Mr Spencer.’

He reached a hand that seemed to swallow up Mikey’s before it gripped him hard and shook.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ Mitch flustered, ‘Deputy Chief Superintendent Davis. He’s just filling me on the latest findings from the investigation.’

Mikey suddenly felt his mouth go very dry.

‘Is there…are there more findings?’ he asked, trying to sound as calm as possible.

‘No, nothing more than we were able to tell you, Mr Spencer. I was explaining to Mr Pearson that the CCTV footage shows it was a tragic accident. Bearing in mind your previous trauma you behaved with extraordinary bravery.’

Mikey gave a shallow shrug.

He wasn’t quite sure where the papers had got the story from, but suddenly a very personal trauma had become very public.

‘History repeats itself in tube tragedy’ was the general vibe.

‘Lightning strikes twice for miserable Mikey’ the least edifying.

‘The Deputy Chief has been telling us that they won’t need to carry out a post-mortem, which is probably best for everyone, especially Josh’s mother. Family friend,’ he explained to the policeman.

‘Well, I best be going,’ said the policeman, subjecting Mikey’s hand to another bone-crunching shake before heading over to the lift.

Mitch waited until he’d gone before gesturing to the spare seat.

‘Are you OK?’ he said to Mikey.

‘Yeah, I think so,’ Mikey replied.

‘Thanks for coming in,’ said Mitch, ‘I just wanted to have a conversation about that song you brought in. The Christmas one?’

Mikey felt his heart flutter but also a slight wave of revulsion pass over him. Josh had only died a few days ago.

But Mikey knew Mitch all too well. Business is business.

The can of worms that had not just opened up but then been chucked all around the room by what had happened, and the raking up of his Dad’s death, had all clouded the original purpose of everything. Getting to Christmas Number One. Was this the moment?

‘Yeah, the Christmas song. So, what are you thinking? Bump it up instead of the Ringtone one?’

Mitch looked at Mikey as if he’d just swallowed a wasp.

‘What?’ he shook his head, ‘Replace it? Oh, no. No, no, no. The opposite. We’re going to release it early. What with Josh’s tragic death it’ll go to Number One instantly and, if we’re clever, we can keep it there for the whole festive period.’

‘So, our song…?’ Mikey asked hesitantly.

‘Yeah, your song. Well, it turns out it wasn’t quite your song, was it? We had a message from a band in Germany who heard that you’d done a cover version of one of theirs.’

‘How?’ asked Mikey.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Mitch, waving away the question as if it was a rogue fly.

‘I think they’d heard from the sound recordist you used for your demo or something like that. Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that we’ve paid them off. Obviously, you can’t use the song but the lawyers have dropped out of the picture.’

‘I…I..’ started Mikey.

Mitch raised a hand to stop him.

‘Hey, it was the least we could do.’

He gave a thin-lipped smile.

‘So long, Mikey. So long.’

Mikey knew exactly what happened because it was the conversation he’d had with Sally three minutes after seeing the papers.

‘I panicked, alright?’ she had said defensively.

‘I knew you had the photographer lined up and, suddenly, Lisa was out of it and I didn’t want to let you down.’

‘Let me down? You humiliated me.’

‘Oh, come on. Girl has a snog in a bar with a good-looking fella. It’s not exactly end of the world stuff.’

‘Yeah, but you’re my girl.’

Mikey could hear the heavy silence down the end of the phone.

‘I did it for you,’ Sally said quietly.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Mikey.

Sally was quiet for a moment as if she was working out which words to use.

‘I know about the label, Mikey. I know they’re thinking of letting you go. I just thought it might help you with them.’

If she knew about the label, who else did?

Mitch didn’t help the mood much, calling him almost in the same breath that hung up with Sally.

‘What the hell is your bird doing with my property?’ he growled.

Mikey shook his head.

‘First off, this is the 90s, Mitch. We don’t talk about birds or chicks anymore. Second off, how does someone become your property. Third off, why are you hassling me about it all.’

‘Because I need you to get your…’ Mitch struggled to find the right word, ‘whatever you call her away from Josh. It doesn’t look good for anyone, including you.’

‘It was a kiss, Mitch, just a kiss. It wasn’t like he was caught taking drugs.’

‘What do you mean, taking drugs. Was he taking drugs?’ Mitch’s voice rose up in an anxious crescendo.

‘Calm down. No one was taking drugs,’ said Mikey.

‘Don’t do that to me,’ said Mitch, ‘and, for your information, he is very much my property in the way that you no longer are.’

With that, he hung up, but the seed of an idea had already planted in Mikey’s head.

‘It’s OK, pal. It’s not a big deal,’ said Mikey, smoothly.

‘But it is,’ said Josh, ‘I mean, she’s your girlfriend. I just need you to know I didn’t ask her to do anything, I was just..’

‘Don’t fret. I know you didn’t. Look, we’re grown-up men in a grown-up world,’ Mikey held his arms out feeling a bit like some kind of mafia don.

‘There’s no hard feelings.’

‘God,’ said Josh, ‘You’re even cooler in real life than you are on vinyl.’

It was a nice line, and for a moment it even made Mikey soften for a moment, but there was no room for sentiment. He had a job to do. Well, in fact, his job was done; the bag of pills was already slipped into Josh’s jacket pocket. Now it was just a case of the others doing their part. He wasn’t too worried about the paps, it was the actors he was more worried about. He’d picked them up from an extras agency that seemed to specialise more in providing bodies for Casualty rather than anything walking and talking. Still, limited budgets and all that. It couldn’t be that hard, could it?

‘You know, both of us could probably learn something from Sally,’ Mikey said, leaning forward.

‘She’s probably more rock’n’roll than either of us. She does what her heart tells her to do in the moment. I’ve never had the guts to do that. What’s that Nike line? Just do it? That’s what she does. She just does it. Doesn’t mean it’s the right thing but you’ve got to admire her balls. So, to speak.’

Mikey gave a wry smile.

‘Listen, I ought to be going,’ he said.

‘Yeah, of course. I might just nip to the loo,’ said Josh.

‘Of course,’ said Mikey, trying to hide his irritation. He just wanted to get this all over now.

He sat back in the chair as he waited for Josh. He had time to examine the stitching and the effortless curve of the wood. Josh was right. They were beautiful chairs. He wondered how much they cost. It might be a fitting way of celebrating once he’d knocked Josh off his perch.

Josh sauntered back into the bar. He suddenly looked absurdly good looking and cool.

Mikey got up.

‘Let’s go,’ he said simply.

They were waiting for them as soon as they walked out of the lobby.

An expert, or to be honest anyone with a set of working eyes, would have noticed that their warrants looked more like Oyster Cards, and the long macs made them look like something out of central casting – which is exactly what they were, thought Mikey. But they were convincingly gruff and their lines were well delivered.

‘Right, gents, this is a stop and search under Section 2 subsection 5 of the criminal prevention act of 1992. Against the wall……please.’

The last word was particularly well spat out.

‘Do you know who I am?’ said Mikey, as a rough pair of hands turned him towards the wall of the club. He could see the same thing happening to Josh out of the corner of his eye.

‘I don’t care, sir. I have a job to do.’

Mikey could see the pap scuttling across the road towards them. Bit slow, sunshine, he thought to himself. You’ve had the past half an hour to get ready.

Mikey felt rough hands pat him up and down and slip into every pocket.

They turned him back around and he had just enough time to register the shared look of confusion on the other cop’s face and the pap as the cop said, ‘Nothing!’ before he felt a sharp tug on his sleeve.

‘Run!’ barked Josh.

Mikey felt himself being dragged away. Josh let go of him after a few yards and kept on running. Mikey wasn’t sure what made him keep on following. Partly it was Josh turning round every few yards to check he was. Partly it was some weird feeling of protectiveness. Partly it felt like some strange dream; tourists blurring into fuzzy shapes as he sprinted past. He could almost hear the soundtrack that would be playing; something a bit punky, maybe a bit of Iggy.

Josh reached the tube station and waited. In the dream sequence, this is where the music would have come to a dramatic halt with a terrible ripping sound as the needle was dragged off the record. Mikey hadn’t stepped over the threshold of a tube station since that terrible day twenty years ago.

‘I can’t,’ were the words that came to his mouth, but somehow never came out. Instead, Josh’s hand grabbed his sleeved and pulled him through the open turnstiles – again, what were the chances of that he thought afterwards – and then through to the open lift doors which closed behind him with a terrible metallic certainty.