Is that all there is?

Paperback edition.Part sociology, part social history, part autobiography, this sequel to Croydon Boy takes a personal look back on life in Britain during the tumultuous years of the 1970s and 1980s. Married at twenty, a father at twenty-one, we catch up with the author in late 1971 living with his wife and baby son in one room at his parents-in-laws’ house. It’s not working out very well.The world is in no better state than he is. British troops have shot dead 13 civil rights demonstrators in Londonderry. Palestinian terrorists have slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The economists insist it can’t happen but unemployment and inflation are spiralling simultaneously. And with the miners out on strike, people are lighting their homes with candles.Then a new leader emerges from the East (Lincolnshire, to be exact). An Iron Lady with peroxide hair, she promises to restore peace and harmony to the land. That’s when the shit really hits the fan.Peter Saunders looks back on a time when middle class parents were desperate to buy computers for their children, but regarded mobile phones as vulgar; when the nation stayed up past midnight to watch a snooker final on TV; when fifteen million trees were felled overnight in a Great Storm; and when we discovered that avocados are not really ’pears,’ and that you don’t have to own a set of fish knives to eat fish. It was also a time when Britain went to war with Argentina, the inner cities went up in flames, the British cabinet was bombed in Brighton and the Berlin Wall collapsed, by accident. It was an extraordinary time to be alive.