Brief thought: North Korea's belligerence has now brought the (distant) prospect of nuclear war back to people's minds, a fear that was rampant, unavoidable and utterly haunting in the 80s. To quote Martin Amis' incredibly evocative article, 'Nuclear City: The Megadeath Intellectuals' (Esquire, 1987):
When nuclear weapons become real to you, when they stop buzzing around your ears and actually move into your head, hardly an hour passes without some throb or flash, some heavy pulse of imagined supercastastrophe.
At the same time, Margaret Thatcher's death has provoked a memorialising of the same decade, filling the air of a week in April, 2013 thickly with the remembered actions and words, nostalgia and hatred intermixed, of Thatcher herself, but also Reagan and the still-living Gorbachev. An odd, hopefully brief, shadow has been cast. I thank the conjunction of world events for bringing back to life the decade before my birth. Please stop at this stage, though.
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