Entry for 11th October, 2008 - Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

I am reading Alan Sillitoe’s “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning” just now, which is an excellent read. It’s a novel about working class life in 1950s Britain, and it is, in many ways, a really good read.
The thing that strikes me about it, is just how much has changed since the 50s. I know this already of course from watching documentaries and talking to my parents, but there’s something about reading about it in a novel that makes it more real. The novel feels like a period piece now, and yet this is a book about the era that my mum and dad grew up in - a post-war landscape of teddy boys and manufacturing and unions and close knit communities. A time when television was just ]beginning to creep into everyone’s homes, and people stayed with their parents until they got married.
How much richer we have become in the UK over the course of a single lifetime. How our expectations have grown. I’ve been reading the book against the background of discussions about climate change, and it really jumped out at me just how much stuff we have made since even 1950 – all those computers and mobile phones and cars and microwave ovens and flat screen tellies have all been made, to feed our ever growing appetite for stuff.
Oddly, if Alan Sillitoe is to be believed, all of that stuff doesn’t necessarily seem to have made our individual lives much happier. We still laugh the same; we still enjoy a night at the pictures and holding the hand of a pretty girl (or boy) and we still like riding on the Big Wheel at the fun fair