A New Decade
4 January

We've dropped into a new decade.

Yes, I know that there's a whole thing about whether you take the decade to start at the beginning or end of this year but majority view is beginning and I'm going with that. I don't care about the concept of zero giving an element of ambiguity to the yearly counting system. It's all a convention anyway.

So, the new media have all had their pundits looking to the future and telling us what the great trends would be. And, inevitably, there's been some grandiose ideas which will almost certainly prove foundless.

Just as I found some of the analysis of the last decade to be misplaced, I think that pundits are missing the smaller more obvious pictures.

For example, no-one has said anything about pensions, retirement and the world of work. In 2019, I shall be 65 years old. In the normal way of things, that would be the year in which I would retire. I do not believe that that is what will happen.

Unless there is a major cull between now and then (and by that I suppose I am meaning large scale and widespread death by disease, war or natural disaster), my guess is that there will be some sort of incentive to working longer, the introduction of micro-jobs bringing with them social points which would be added on to a state pension and a raising of mandatory retirement age.

I also think that there has been very little discussion about supply chains. I've been reading that some manufacturers who had outsourced production to Eastern Europe are returning their manufacturing bases to this country. I suspect that this in only the beginning. Food travels too far. Clothes travel too far. Toys travel too far. We are such a "Just In Time" society that there is no slack in the system and any jolt has major repercussions.

These things will change.

And I suspect and hope that macro economic theory will change and that that change will not come from America but from either India or China.

I don't know if this Journal will still be in existence in ten years' time. I didn't know that it would last this long. If it is, then it will be interesting to see if any of those three things have come to pass.

Meanwhile, television.

I've been catching up on the festive season television thanks to TV on demand.

I was vastly disappointed with The Turn of the Screw. When will people learnt that events are only creepy when they are not explained and open to interpretation. This assault on the Henry James story tried to add a post history with the governess being psycho-analysed before being hung for the murder of Miles. It added in explicit sexual activity and the corruption of the innocent. As a consequence, it was very uninteresting and brazenly titillating.

Hustle has returned. Matt di Angelo is still in the cast. He didn't get his kit off in the last series; we have crossed our fingers and made the necessary obeisances in hope for this.

Return to Cranford was a delight and yet somehow it did not rise to the heights of the first series. Still, it was a great pleasure to make the acquaintance of Miss Matty and her entourage once more. And the players are a veritable Who's Who of English theatre. All of the original Elizabeth Gaskell material has now been used. I wonder if they will venture to invent material for a third installment should this one be another raging success around the globe.

One of the new characters was Tom Hiddleston. He played William Buxton. He also appears in Wallander which has just started a new series. He was also in The Ruby in the Smoke alongside Matt Smith who will be the new Doctor now that David Tennant has stepped down.

David Tennant's final episodes of Dr Who were very fine, full of tension, full of the right kind of sentiment and emotion. I was very uncertain about him when he first arrived. I'd liked Christopher Eccleston's Doctor very much. Nevertheless, he has been a star in the rôle.

However, the best of all was An Englishman In New York. I'd been completely oblivious of this in pre-production and only happened upon it in the schedules by chance. It was quite amazing. It's a while since I have been so absorbed in a television drama. John Hurt reprised his portrayal of Quentin Crisp in his latter years whilst living in New York as a resident alien.

For me, the most poignant segment was that dealing with Quentin's friendship with a young gay artist Patrick Angus, played by Johnathon Tucker. Having flippantly remarked that AIDS was a fad at the beginning of the 1980s, Crisp was ostracised by most of the gay elite. It took twenty years to prove him right but World AIDS Day is no longer a big media event. At this time, Crisp first befriended Angus, then took an interest in him as an artist and finally, once he realised that the young man was dying from AIDS, championed his work in New York galleries. It was unbearably poignant.

So, I laughed and cried in all the right places. I watched a part of my history played out before me. I was actually in the audience for one of his shows at the Edinburgh Festival one year. It was an excellent piece of work.

I'm part of that generation which remembers The Naked Civil Servant vividly. It was originally transmitted on 17 December 1975 so I must have seen a repeat once it had won several awards because I remember seeing it on a summer's evening.

In fact, I watched it with my mum. At the end she said "He must have been very brave". I'm sure that the remark was made in all tenderness. It may even have been intended to be helpful to me. If so, it had quite the opposite effect because I remember voices inside me screaming "But I don't want to have to be brave".

However, bravery is not the sort of thing that can be side-stepped. Ultimately, you just do it and get along with things. Certainly, I would never have placed myself where I am twenty-five years later. And that is just a little bit of a miracle.