New Beginnings

 

Your Humble Narrator, Snowdon, 1980 - image © John Latham

 

Exactly forty years ago today, on the twenty-seventh of September 1980, we moved here to live in Bethesda, a town we've lived in and around for all but nine months of that forty years. Four decades on and the world looks a very different place in so many ways. The obvious and perhaps trite examples would be the internet and social media, the rise of populism or Covid-19. The price of everything: a pint now ten times the 1980 price; pre-Covid licensing hours practically unlimited; no-smoking almost anywhere: so few smokers these days. When we came here most adults smoked; it was a fact of life then: pubs, cafés and public transport were thick with the blue haze of cigarette, pipe and cigar smoke.

Pubs and pub-culture have changed more in the last forty years than in the previous hundred. In 1980, opening hours were still the same as in the 1950's: 11:00 or 12:00 till 2:30 in the afternoon and 5:00 till 10:30 at night. Sundays as I've mentioned were still dry here in Arfon-Dwyfor, with only membership clubs legally able to serve on the Sabbath; although there were plenty of side-doors to pubs round here swinging freely enough on the Lord's day. Somehow, strangely, the decline of the pub started with the liberalisation of licensing hours; hostelries opened when and for how long they liked, pretty much. The problem was that it was no longer predictable that a pub might be open for business if you visited one on the off chance - so many places were shut when previously you at least knew they would be open. Things have only worsened; the price of beer became prohibitive for landlords to make any decent profit from drinks alone and the resulting rise of gastro-pubs and their rather less talented cousins has shifted the pub from a place to meet people and have a few drinks to somewhere to drag the family for what is very often a sub-standard dining experience. Whether this trend ever changes remains to be seen, but hey ho, I don't get out much these days, anyway.  According to a document that I found, at one time there were over seventy pubs in Bangor and Hirael alone and though much reduced in number by 1980, there were still many more than are left today and with the knock-on effects of the pandemic we will be lucky to have a dozen left in future, all struggling to survive.

The political backdrop to our move here was the earliest days of Thatcherism; the worst of it yet to come, but unemployment rising fast and the Falklands just around the corner; that convenient 'conflict' that was used to rally the nation behind a government busily selling off every last bit of publicly-owned business to the private sector under the guise of democratising 'shareholding'. Aside from the 'right to buy' scheme, the biggest con imaginable; ordinary folk bought up domestic-sized packets of shares in the electricity, gas and telecoms businesses that were theirs in the first place, allowing the back-door purchase of shareholdings many orders of magnitude greater by the private sector and the wealthy, given them majority holdings and therefore the balance of voting power in governing the new 'businesses'. A neat trick used by con artists down the centuries - steal someones stuff and flog it back to them. Neat, but not right.

Forty years on and where are we? Another Tory NonGovernment® up to much the same stuff; except that far from having been given the free ride he was so obviously expecting, the current Prime Minister has stumbled into a disaster zone he could not have foreseen and that he can do nothing about. It will be interesting to see how this NonGovernment® deals with the next phase of this pandemic and its collateral damage: rising infection and death rates, mass unemployment, the collapse of all those small and medium businesses that are the very mainstay of our economy: it is hard not to foresee civil unrest at the end of this long and dank tunnel at the very least; but it's to be hoped that those who are right-thinking and honest within the Tory ranks - and there are some - will call the arch-buffoon and his connected cronies out. One thing I can't see any time soon is a return to full or anywhere near full, and proper employment. Sad to think that in those forty years so little has really changed, after all.