1984 and the Pivotal Question.

I just noticed a headline on the BBC News website. It said that Wham’s pop classic, Last Christmas, has risen to the top of the charts thirty nine years after it was first released. For no other reason than mild curiosity, I mentally worked out what I was doing exactly thirty nine years ago. December 1984: Where was I and what was I doing in December 1984?

If I were writing my memoirs I would probably devote a whole chapter to that very month and style it ‘The Christmas of the Two Janets.’ But then I began to think on to what followed and realised something that’s never fully sunk in before. Christmas 1984 was about much more than the stirrings of clandestine relationships with two women who happened to be called Janet. It was the start of two years of turbulence, stress, and deep change that have never been matched by any other two years of my life. By the end of it I was a profoundly different person living in a totally different world. It was as though somebody had picked me up, pushed me slowly through a fire, and then set me down on the other side of the planet.

Upon realising that fact, I began to experience a sense of concern. Could this be a cyclical thing, I thought. Am I experiencing the plot of a JB Priestly time play? Have I come around full circle and, if so, why? Is it just another lesson in the ongoing process of reviewing a life, or is a new cycle beginning?

I decided I was being fanciful and that it’s neither. It is odd, though, that 1984 is such an iconic date in the calendar of socio-political direction, being the title of Orwell’s novel. So am I being told that I’m right in the reservations I entertain about where current world trends are taking us? I suppose time will tell, and I wonder whether I have enough of it left to find out.