Vox Meditantis

27th October 1970

Another Tuesday at the office, and the typewriter keys make their endless circles beneath my fingers – tap, return, tap, return – the same rhythm as yesterday, as last week, as forever. Mr Hollis wants the quarterly accounts finished by Friday, though he knows full well the ledgers are a mess. The decimalisation is coming in February and everyone’s in a panic about shillings and pence, as if the world will end when we trade our pounds for something tidier. Change is coming whether we like it or not, yet here we are, clinging to the old ways like shipwreck survivors to driftwood.

The newsagent down the street has the Evening Standard pinned up with headlines about the dockers’ strike spreading. Good for them, I say, though I daren’t say it aloud. Let them refuse. Let them make the wheels stop turning. All this talk of productivity and modernisation – what does it mean for the likes of us, scratching away at invoices whilst the men in Whitehall decide our futures? Heath promises order, discipline, a return to sense. But whose sense? Not mine, certainly.

I watched the clock all afternoon, its hands sweeping their relentless circuit. Half past two felt exactly like half past two did yesterday, and will tomorrow. Time doesn’t change, only we do – or perhaps we don’t change at all, only imagine we might.

My mother used to say I had too much fire in me for my own good. She’d be horrified to see me here, surrounded by carbon paper and filing cabinets, my hands stained with ink instead of flour. She wanted me respectable, settled, safe – a teacher perhaps, or a nurse, something with a pension and a wedding ring to follow. Instead I’ve ended up a glorified clerk, recording other people’s money, their comings and goings, their small victories and disasters. She’d call it wasted potential. Perhaps she’d be right. But at least I’m here on my own terms, aren’t I? At least I didn’t marry the butcher’s son from Peckham who smelled of blood and boredom.

Mother believed in circles too, though hers were different from mine. The seasons, the liturgical calendar, the endless round of births and deaths. Everything returns, she’d say. Everything comes back. I wonder if that’s supposed to be comforting.

The market across the street is closing now. I can hear the vendors packing away their barrows, the metal scraping against cobblestones. Tomorrow they’ll return to the same spots, sell the same apples and cabbages, exchange the same pleasantries with the same customers. Round and round we go.

I should finish the Barrington file before I leave. But tonight I think I’ll walk home the long way, past the new building sites where they’re knocking down the old Georgian houses. At least that’s change you can see with your own eyes – not the invisible kind that creeps up on you whilst you’re busy typing invoices.

Late 1960s-early 1970s Britain saw accelerating economic modernisation, including the shift to decimal currency on 15 February 1971 after centuries of pounds-shillings-pence, which unsettled businesses and clerical workforces alike. Industrial unrest was widespread in 1970, with notable dock strikes and disputes testing Prime Minister Edward Heath’s new Conservative government and its push for productivity and curbs on union power. London’s redevelopment displaced older housing stock as post-war planning and road schemes advanced. In the following years, inflation and repeated strikes culminated in the mid-1970s crises and the 1974-79 Labour governments, setting the stage for the late-1970s “Winter of Discontent” and subsequent economic restructuring under Margaret Thatcher.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.