Boomer memoirs... the least they could do is say sorry

Once upon a time, in the cold grey years after the Second World War, Britain was a land of hope (if not glory), symbolised by a Labour landslide and the newly created welfare state.

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Simultaneously, the baby-boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964, grew up in a mood of never look back, fuelled by coronation chicken and toad in the hole, washed down, in the immortal words of Enid Blyton, with “lashings of ginger beer”.

Our parents were committed to renewing a broken world through the three Es of energy, economy and education. The biggest “never” in our coming of age - I was born in 1953 was Harold Macmillan’s “You’ve never had it so good”.

History seemed to have scattered fairy dust on us boomers, the children of peace. In the age of free school milk, we were too young to grasp the extent of our good luck. Only the survivors of world war - prematurely aged veterans, sometimes scarred beyond recognition - knew the horrors we'd been spared.

By 1963, notoriously the year the poet Philip Larkin discovered sexual intercourse, Britain had been remade for a certain kind of English boy (still a full decade before women's lib). The soft power of English language, culture and football seemed briefly to restore Britannia to her throne. In retrospect, this was a postwar restoration, an end-of-the-pier show starring James Bond, The Beatles and Dad’s Army.

This surreal farrago of Britishness would culminate in Monty Python's Flying Circus, which launched on the BBC in the autumn of 1969. While the Seventies began with the three-day week and juxtaposed the Queen's silver jubilee with punk rock's “Anarchy in the UK”, it culminated with “Labour Isn't Working” and the election of Margaret Thatcher. Despite harbingers of future trouble, the boomers were enjoying a Neverland of manageable inflation, steady jobs with good pensions, and the blessings of free healthcare. We revelled in peace, wallowed in plenty and flew wherever we chose.