The 60s

Don’t forget – A Short History of Anxiety, is free to download, from Amazon, next weekend.

Most young people view the 60s as a decadent decade of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. The only true part is the rock ‘n roll. The music changed everything, because of the dirge that had gone before.

Time to correct the record. We had no –

• Mobile phone.
• Text messages.
• WhatsApp
• Internet.
• Only one radio,
• Your dad controlled the only TV and phone.
• Recorded music was on vinyl – 40 minutes for 1/5 of your salary.
  • How did people get a date?

Like this!

Today, I want to talk about April in Starnberg and other flirts. It’s about how boy met girl without any help. OK. Maybe some.

Meet my heroines.

Debbie in the first story, who has decided to give her boss the opportunity to escape his depression by going on holiday with her, or the Asian beauty, in The Road To Troy, a widow but with the true wisdom that comes with bereavement, and Diedre, the worldly-wise late teen, fascinated by a youthful boaster, about to have his teenage angst tested. Three stories that happened on holiday in the sixties. Germany, Turkey and Jersey, described as never before.
How does it work? In April in Starnberg, our heroine suggests her boss choose the destination and gives him twelve hours to fix their holiday. She also believes she has the answers to life’s difficult questions, especially about romance, but must soon learn that still waters run deep. Her boss has hidden talents she never expected. One of them was his ability to recite the Wasteland by T S Eliot.
She discovers that a poem she had never heard of, contains the wisdom for both their lives.
A happy end is assured.
April in Starnberg is part of the ‘Angst and the Beatles Generation,’ series of 60s stories.
In The Road to Troy, a grieving widow rescues a marriage and makes the ultimate sacrifice for what she can no longer have. A story of a catastrophe, which couldn’t happen in the age of the mobile (cell) phone – or could it?
Finally, a touching coming-of-age teen yarn for all true romantics.

The Sixties is within living memory, but there was no internet, or mobile phone, but we had the Beatles, which was a bigger leap forward than digital connectivity. Finally, our own music!
Prior to the 60s the youth were clones of their parents. They wore their type of clothes and listened to their music, watched their TV. The reason was simple. There was nothing else available to young people. Just one telephone, radio or TV available in a household and the old man decided who got to watch what or how much time could be spent on a phone system, metered by the minute.
If you forgot something, you lived with it and if it were too dire, dealt with the consequences.
My memory of the 60s was having a bad conscience about things I hadn’t done well enough. Teachers were abusive, you often got only one chance to ask a girl out, before contact was lost – maybe forever! She didn’t have a texting device to pick up where one had left off. Advice was scant in a world parents didn’t or wouldn’t comprehend.
I can summarise the 60s with one word – angst.