07 July 2024

It's Sunday Morning. The Weekend is Dead.

Remembering the grey twilight of the early 70s up and down the sewage stoked shores of these hallowed isles.

An era of miners' strikes and constant power cuts as a consequence. Unemptied refuse bins piling on the streets and troops deployed to clean up the decaying heaps.

Nobody seemed to mind too much. The miners were heroic then, the martyrs of Great Britain's declining heavy industry and just in their demands for better pay.

The winter was long and filled with blackouts; kettles were boiled and baths filled with military precision lest the lights blinked off and caught you in the dark. Children padded home from school through the sleet and snow and watched what they could on the tragic lantern before the cathode rays invariably died.

Late at night their parents secretly cursed those same strikers they countenanced by day. Heavy metal canisters of Calor Gas appeared in every house like early Christmas presents.

 Ib Sibling

 

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