You'll be reading, or passing over, any number of pieces with titles like this, so let me put you right at once if you're worried that I'm dishing out a retrospective on the 60s and its most famous year. I'm not. I have no strong views about it. Yes, I participated in the decade, from the very beginning of it to the very end. Some aspects struck me as pretty good; others seemed, as with every other decade, just like normal life; and 'If you're going to San Francisco etc' was always to laugh at.
The point of this post is simple and single: it is to register the claim that the 1960s did not begin until some way into that decade as measured by the mere calendar. I arrived in this country in the autumn of 1962 and it still felt like what the 1950s read like: gas fires, milk and cigarette machines, Lyons Corner Houses, Frank Ifield in the charts. On the Aldermaston March of 1963, we were shouting 'Macmillan out, out, out.' It's only an impression, but a fixed one, that what we think of as the 60s emerged gradually. Maybe all decades do.
