This picture of Ken from ODPM in 2005.
Thursday 20 January 1983 …went to see Ken Livingstone in evening – great.
I remember that evening pretty well. I am fairly sure I went with Simon Jacobs, Jon Gorvett and other friends to that event. It was pretty popular – I think it was held in the FY lecture theatre – if not one of the other large lecture theatres.
Ken Livingstone was the head of the Greater London Council (GLC) at that time. There was talk of him running for parliament that year but he didn’t do so; perhaps he was too busy talking to student bodies like ours to get his selection application in on time.
I seem to recall that his most memorable rhetoric was about the Northern Ireland troubles and his advocacy of a unilateral “Troops Out” policy. But he spoke about most of the core left wing topics of the day and was very convincing, both as a speaker and (unusually for a political visitor) directly addressing questions put to him afterwards.
Nearly 30 years later, I actually got to chat convivially with Ken Livingstone at a party “down his way”.
While Ken always had contrarian views and courted controversy, personally I was surprised when his statements went off the scale and led to his suspension from the Labour party a few years after that.
Returning to 1983…
Diary suggests a pretty lazy weekend, mostly spent with Liza O’Connor although we did go to Anju Sanehi’s party on the Saturday evening.
Airplane II – Surely I Must Be Joking? (I’m Not Joking And…)
There’s not much worthy of report until we get to the next weekend. Allow me to translate the relevant bit of Saturday’s entry:
…went with Liza and mum to see Airplane II…
I had never previously been out on a date with a girlfriend’s mother also in tow. A very unusual situation for a Keele student in term time, but I had chosen to go out with the Keele village pub landlord’s daughter.
I don’t think there was a repeat of this type of event with Liza. I got on fine with Liza’s mum, but perhaps the matter of dates was better left à deux.
I don’t think I again experienced the “girlfriend’s mother with us on a date” phenomenon again for more than 10 years, after which the presence of Janie’s mum became an occasional feature for a while. But that was to be “The Real Thing”.
Returning to 1983, this particular movie, Airplane II: The Sequel didn’t help. I had seen Airplane! and thought it very funny. Neither Liza nor her mum had seen the original movie but had learned of its reputation and therefore wanted to see the sequel.
My problem with the sequel was that, to me, it is simply a rehashing of the same jokes again in an even sillier scenario – stretching implausibility beyond the limits even of a cornball comedy.
In short, Liza and her mum were laughing like drains and I was not laughing much, while mostly thinking “this is drains” and “looks like I picked the wrong weekend to quit inhaling nitrous oxide”:
Still, Liza, her mum and I came out the other side of that evening.
5 February 1983 – “Chinese Cultural Society Do”, Presumably To Hail In The Year Of the Pig
After another fairly mundane week, the following weekend saw me and Liza at a Chinese Cultural Society event, which I think was a New Year’s celebration held a week or so early (probably because there were myriad events the following weekend for Valentines).
I have described in a previous piece the “joint venture” Tony Wong and I conceived to enhance the Jewish Society and the Chinese Cultural Society by partnering.
I have hardly any pictures from that era, so I commissioned DALL_E to help me try to illustrate this event.
Joking apart, I do remember that the Chinese Cultural Society always put on a good party.
The day after that “do”, however, my term and indeed the next few months took an unexpected and unwanted turn, which I shall cover next time.