There is a low hum in the background of modern life made of small, practical motions. It is not an app notification. It is the slow competence of people who learned to mend, measure, improvise and manage before everything was a service. If you grew up with school woodwork, home economics or a parent who … Read more
There is a peculiar muscle older Britons often flex without advertising it. It is not the muscle of nostalgia. It is the muscle that resists the urge to panic when a train is late by forty minutes, when the electricity blinks, when you cannot order anything and expect to have it delivered by tea time. … Read more
There is a particular calm to the phrase Life in the 60s and 70s Had Fewer Interruptions. It is not nostalgia pure and untroubled. It is, instead, a claim about the texture of attention and the architecture of everyday consciousness. I want to suggest that fewer interruptions did not merely change schedules. They changed habits … Read more
There is a stubborn truth about behaviour that modern gurus and algorithmic coaches rarely admit. Some practices and routines from the 1960s and 1970s work better for a lot of people than the slick advice we get now. This article explores why a handful of old habits still outperform fashionable strategies and why you might … Read more
The idea that the 60s and 70s were only about bellbottoms and protest songs is a lazy shorthand. Those decades taught practical, stubborn lessons about how people organised time money and social life that our current culture either forgot or actively discarded. I do not romanticise every aspect of those times. Plenty was messy unjust … Read more
I keep thinking about a photograph my neighbour has pinned above his mantel a crooked little thing from the late 1970s. A woman sits at a kitchen table by the window. The kettle steams. Outside is a narrow British street and a cat on the sill. There is no phone in her hand. No timetable … Read more
I admit I have a soft spot for the domestic choreography of the 1960s and 1970s. Not the glossy postcard version sold by reruns and nostalgia feeds but the practical oddities people kept that actually made life simpler in small ways. This is not a plea to erase progress. It is a call to rescue … Read more
I did not expect to find better solutions to modern noise in the back of a vintage recipe book or under a scratched bedside lamp but there they were. Simple habits from the 60s and 70s keep cropping up in conversations with people who are quietly less frazzled than the rest of us. This is … Read more
There is a persistent memory people trade at dinner parties and on quiet walks: life in the 1960s and 1970s moved at a different rhythm and, paradoxically, that rhythm soothed nerves most of us now take for granted. This is not a nostalgia piece that paints the past as sunlit and untroubled. People then had … Read more
I remember being told once that some useful things never really go out of fashion. That is oddly true for a habit that many people now call quaint but which quietly keeps showing up in study after study and in clinic after clinic. It began before the internet in earnest and it survived the rise … Read more