Some days the tune stuck in your mind is trying to tell you something. So what am I to make of Duran Duran taking up residence in my sub-conscious? I was never a fan, though the Birmingham office of AYMM (long since consumed by the monolith that is EY) acted as their accountants and Sharon was training there. Unaccountably it seems my sub-conscious has rather lower taste than I would wish. Bastard.
My old college room-mate (a Marxist as I recall - they were two a penny in those days) went into business after a bitter dalliance with teaching and wrote to me describing business as a 'fascinating dynamic.' I have no idea whether he coined this himself but anyway I purloined it and repeated it over those years when I made my living both by advising businesses and being in business myself - which is all commercial lawyering is about. A fascinating dynamic indeed - too bloody right. The 80s unleashed a wave of commercial ingenuity and originality. It spawned unthought of riches and left the rich free to abuse their position (or of course to use it wisely) as they saw fit. Now (depending on your point of view) this may have been a thoroughly bad thing but what it most definitely was not was the same as before. For some of us (probably not enough of us I grant you) it was a time when we felt we really could wrest influence away from the old guard. Ours was going to be a benign dictatorship of the state educated savants. We were to be wise and generous and use our authority lightly. As I look at it now I realise that we shouldn't have been trusted - we pissed the whole inheritance up the wall and now we have what we deserve - government by 'experts' and unelected bureaucrats. We didn't walk blindly into this mess, we did so knowingly when we should have been kicking and screaming obscenities. May our children damn us.
I think what has happened is that the recent 80s season on BBC2 has ambushed me, in particular the TOTP2 special on the Duran boys which I watched rather than bear the ten o'clock news. The news is unutterably depressing from a purely selfish point of view - we own BP shares (not a lot but I do feel vaguely proprietorial about it) and each day brings more news of our dividends being pumped unstoppably into the Gulf of Mexico. Just to rub it in there is usually some footage of that pious fake Obama doing a bit of faux sincere Brit bashing. Be the change indeed.
But this 80s malarkey (just had to check that one in the OED) has got me thinking about that maligned decade. I know I shouldn't admit this but I had a bloody fantastic time in the 80s. I graduated, I was on the dole for a year (a rite of passage for my generation of university leavers - one now beckoning the modern graduate), I played some of my best rugby, I definitely played my best golf, I got married, I became a father and Donald Fagen's The Nightfly was released. I mention this last one if only to illustrate that the decade was not quite the cultural desert so often portrayed. In fact I am listening to The Nightfly as I write this, partly to inspire me and also to try to dislodge bloody Duran Duran.
My old college room-mate (a Marxist as I recall - they were two a penny in those days) went into business after a bitter dalliance with teaching and wrote to me describing business as a 'fascinating dynamic.' I have no idea whether he coined this himself but anyway I purloined it and repeated it over those years when I made my living both by advising businesses and being in business myself - which is all commercial lawyering is about. A fascinating dynamic indeed - too bloody right. The 80s unleashed a wave of commercial ingenuity and originality. It spawned unthought of riches and left the rich free to abuse their position (or of course to use it wisely) as they saw fit. Now (depending on your point of view) this may have been a thoroughly bad thing but what it most definitely was not was the same as before. For some of us (probably not enough of us I grant you) it was a time when we felt we really could wrest influence away from the old guard. Ours was going to be a benign dictatorship of the state educated savants. We were to be wise and generous and use our authority lightly. As I look at it now I realise that we shouldn't have been trusted - we pissed the whole inheritance up the wall and now we have what we deserve - government by 'experts' and unelected bureaucrats. We didn't walk blindly into this mess, we did so knowingly when we should have been kicking and screaming obscenities. May our children damn us.
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