It was the best of times — the 1990s

You’re right of course that my view of the 1990s is tinged with nostalgia. I didn’t think it was a golden age at the time. Indeed, I suspect I was quite cynical about the world around me,

despite being credulous in other ways.

Looking back, even some of the culture in which I immersed myself during the 1990s makes me cringe today. Thanks for reminding me about William Gibson, one of the few authors who impressed

me then and whose books I would happily return to (even though he is now forever tainted by Dominic Cummings’s imprimatur).

I read authors like Will Self, who wrote tortuous sentences that I can’t bear any more, and Douglas Coupland, whose sarcastic takes on pop culture I later decided were terribly boring. And

why did I subject myself to drivel like William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac during that decade? Some of my youthful tastes baffle me now.

You mention how technology has transformed our lives in the intervening years.

The mobile revolution and the internet were in their infancy in the 1990s. My first mobile phone was capable of little more than texting and making calls. And it could fulfil those functions

only when I had enough cash to load it with credit. Often, faced with the prospect of spending my last £20 on a top-up, I’d opt to remain incommunicado and invest instead in a 12 pack of

Stella Artois and a night at an indie disco.

If I’d spent even fifteen minutes staring at the device on a train, I would have looked quite mad or desperate for company. Now, I can read the news, plot my course through a city, and

juggle various emails and messages, on a colourful panel that is only slightly less addictive than crack cocaine.

The consequence, as you suggest, is that the course of our lives is increasingly determined by algorithms that we cannot begin to understand. And, for freelancers like us, it’s almost

impossible to switch off from work completely. We’re forever anxious that, if we don’t dash off just one more quick reply to an email, we’ll miss out on an important job.

You concede that attitudes have become more puritan over the last two decades, but you tell me that, “Things can only get better”. My wife and some of my most astute friends echo that view.

They assure me that the worst excesses of #MeToo and trans activism will pass and their confidence makes some sense.

Many of the social reforms that have been implemented since the sixties were clearly just and right. In every campaign for acceptance, there were activists pushing harder and further,

possibly with their own, more radical political agendas in mind, but that doesn’t mean that we should reverse changes that made it more difficult to discriminate against others on the basis

of colour, sexuality or gender.

We tend to expect each revolution in social attitudes to be followed by an adjustment that leads to equilibrium. I’m just not sure that a correction to “woke” culture is happening yet.

You live in Paris and, while I have no firm evidence, I sense that France is less in thrall to these new orthodoxies than English-speaking countries. The French are too fond of their

reputation for foie gras and philandering to embrace veganism and classes in consent with genuine enthusiasm.

You left Belfast to broaden your horizons and stayed away. In the mid-1990s, I left Northern Ireland too, but I eventually came back. It was the decade that “Belfast got the buzz”, in the

words of a television advert from the era, as road-blocks were removed from the city centre and developers began a spree of building that continues today.

Like you, I didn’t regard the Good Friday Agreement as perfect. It asked a lot of victims of terrorism, in particular. They had to accept the release of prisoners, many of whom failed to

show a shred of remorse or humility, despite the grace that had been extended to them.

But, the 1998 deal did entrench the principle of consent and much else besides. It’s been misused and distorted in the years since, but every subsequent revision of the agreement, at St

Andrews, Hillsborough and Stormont House, made it far worse than the original. In this way too, things have deteriorated since the 1990s.

Where you found stability under Major and Blair boring, even as a young man I looked for no political thrills beyond the odd change in government. You’re right that I supported Brexit (after

much deliberation), but the political landscape had changed drastically by then.

Officially, the EU was only formed in 1993, following the Maastricht Treaty, and the extent of its federalising mission was not yet so blatant. More far-sighted commentators could see where

it was heading, but the euro wasn’t introduced until the end of the decade. The crash was years away, as was the Lisbon Treaty, which entrenched the idea of a single foreign policy among

other aspects of quasi-statehood. I didn’t support Brexit because I relished tumult and uncertainty. I simply believed that too many aspects of the UK’s future were slipping beyond the

influence of its electorate.

You wrote a lot about your life and I identify with much of it. I didn’t immediately carve out a role for myself in the 1990s either. All of your frustration with boring jobs, low pay and

lack of direction, I experienced and shared.

My defence of the 1990s isn’t a hymn to my personal happiness at that time. In youth, the colours will always seem brighter, the tunes catchier and change more exciting, but there’s usually

plenty of angst and confusion too. As we get older we become surer of our place in the world.

At least we both got to navigate those years without being subjected to the 24-hour scrutiny and instant judgements of social media. We could mess about and joke without fear of being

misinterpreted and becoming a global news story. We could make ineffectual attempts to find girls, with the penalty for our clumsiness likely only to be embarrassment and rejection rather

than accusations of harassment.

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