Could a Birmingham reggae band really have kick started the Northern Ireland peace process?
That’s what Pete Millington reckons. 1983 was a scary year for bleeding hearts and lefties like me. One main reason it was such a scary year was because it was the year before 1984 and expectations were running high. These days authors have probably learnt the lesson about not setting futuristic novels too close to the time of writing. But the future is all so relative, that’s the problem. Had Orwell called his book 2084 there might not have been such a high level of paranoia, people would have had 100 more years to digest and analyse the message and, a bit like old Nostradamus with his cauldron, realised that he was probably prophesizing in the wind. But there was something about the prelude to the real the real 1984 that was very unnerving, Orwell seemed to have struck a nerve with his level of accuracy. I could bang on about the context of the era for another page, but why bother when one word encapsulates the atmosphere of the time so well… THATCHER It’s hard to believe that the do
