Ian McMillan: What if all our 30-year secrets were released?

I love the language of the process, the way we talk of the papers being “released” as though they’re birds flapping their way out of a cage. I’m fond of the delicacy of “papers”, which makes them seem fragile and ephemeral; I imagine them curling and browning in files until a door is unlocked and they’re dragged out to face the waiting world, their typing errors exposed to us all, their blots and crossings-out and underlinings and notes and exclamation marks in their margins giving them a human quality. I like the way we’re fairly interested in the words and the decisions and the policy discussions but, to be honest, we’re really interested in the accompanying photographs pulled out by news editors about what people were wearing at the time, what cars they were driving, what buildings they were walking in and out of.

Did Sir Geoffrey Howe’s suit really fit him that badly? Were those policemen really tackling rioters just dressed in ordinary coppers’ uniforms? Was everybody in that crowd scene really smoking and was their hair really that long and their beards so unkempt? How odd and old-fashioned they look, how very 1980s! Perhaps we’re really interested in a combination of the decisions and the clothes because how can people who looked so out-of-date have been in charge of the country? Of course, that’s because it was the 1980s, and those people didn’t think they looked old-fashioned, they thought they looked up-to-the-minute and hip. How were they to know that time would stick a custard pie in their faces and make them look daft and ancient?

Then I had a sudden, chilling, thought. What if everyone’s papers from 30 years ago got released every year? Not just the public figures, the ones whose decisions shaped our lives, but the rest of us, whose decisions shape hardly anyone’s lives, including our own?

So where was I at the end of 1981, and what was I up to? And, perhaps more interestingly, what was I wearing? Well, I was 25-years-old and 1981 had been a pretty amazing year for me; having got married in 1979, I’d taken the plunge in May of 1981 and given up my job and become a full-time writer.

I’d left the tennis-ball factory far behind and I was plying the inky trade. Records show that the winter of 1981-82 was a particularly bad one and I have vague memories of walking up to Wombwell station in the snow to catch a train to go and do a gig somewhere or go to interview someone for a long-defunct Yorkshire Arts magazine.

I would have been wearing a parka, I reckon, a big one with a hood. There would have been a reporter’s notebook in the pocket. I would have been wearing flared jeans and a big jumper so I would have looked like a fisherman or perhaps a folk singer pretending to be a fisherman. I would have still had my beard, the one you can see in photographs of me at the time because, frankly, you can’t see much else.

I look like I’m hiding behind it; it’s less a beard and more a privet hedge. It’s vast and unruly and I’m sure that if you looked closely enough you could have detected drops of soup in it, alongside crumbs of the bread I dipped in the aforementioned Cream of Tomato.

I would have been carrying a briefcase and the briefcase would have had a yellow sticker on that said Writer on Tour; that sticker stayed on the briefcase for years until it faded and floated away.

Of course, I wouldn’t have had a mobile phone in my pocket but I would have had a purse bulging with change for me to go to a phone box to ring whoever I was going to see to tell them that my train was going to be late. Trains seemed much worse in those days; later more often, cancelled more frequently, and maybe that’s why all these years later I always go for the train before the one I need to catch because I still just don’t trust them. I would have been carrying a load of letters to post because that’s how you communicated with people; I remember a post-box by Wombwell Station next to the phone box I used to use to tell people I was going to be late.

Just look at the state of me, the state of all of us 30 years ago, thinking we looked good and we knew what we were doing. Then maybe we’ll cut those politicians a bit of slack. Just a little bit.