Continued … British pub culture is legendary but outside of the main cities, rambling was the thing I remember most – the British turning it into an art form, with the regulation boots and wax jackets, signposted public thoroughfares running through other people’s properties [often farms], maps held in hands and a cliffside pub somewhere at the other end, for a breather. Snowdon, Cairngorms, Lake District, Cheviot Way.

What I noticed in Australia was the tendency to get out with the boys on the road and kick an oval ‘footy’ thirty yards to each other, ‘mark’ it and kick it back again until a car came along. There tended to be asphalt surfaces at schools with poles at each end and extended metal rings at the top. These were of no use to the boys – they were girls’ netball courts, netball the largest female sport.

Every sort of outdoor activity in Australia is induced by the mild climate and swimming, lying on the beach and to a lesser extent, sailing were ultra-popular in my days there. Indoor cricket had its heyday and virtually every guy I knew played on a team but cricket was harder to organize unless there were more than a few guys together, say at a barbecue. Then they’d set up a box at one end of the longest outdoor stretch in the backyard and bowl a few balls down.

I’m on shakier ground in the US, as my experience was mainly Orange County, San Clemente, San Diego and the western seaboard but the car was the thing there. Even to play sport you needed to drive there first. Mall hiking became popular and we did walk because we were close to the ocean but the roads and paths weren’t designed for it.

The ocean culture was the thing there as well and many an hour was spent at Oceanside, less so at Del Mar but my memory is that things tended to be organized a lot. When frisbies came out, suddenly there was a uniform [who determined that, I wonder], regional and then World Series. In the US, any new trend quickly had a World Championship. Far more common was for the guys and girls to congregate in cars at lookout points and to go surfing.

In Vancouver, we’d walk down to English Bay and stroll around the promenade or go sailing or get in the car and head up to Whistler where mountain biking was the summer thing and skiing the winter. Sitting around in Stanley Park was quite nice too and sometimes there was a rodeo out of town to visit.

Here in the former USSR, the summer thing to do is kick around a football [soccer] in any of the myriad grassed areas between the long housing blocks and during the day these are safe enough, full of kids and grandmothers. In the winter, the kids pick up hockey sticks and head for any iced area but in particular, in recent years, to one of the outdoor hockey rinks the government built near every school – you see hoards of kids there and the macho types hit the puck around. Basketball backboards and rings are everywhere near schools as well.

As you know, spectating’s big everywhere, more so in the US and Australia than Britain, where more tend to watch it through the box. I used to watch the Angels when they were in LA, Geelong in Australia and Spurs in Britain [in the north I used to play more than watch]. Here I follow Ak Bars but there’s not much time.

And that’s the thing – time. With the inequities between the unit cost of lifestyles no one can afford and the deficiencies in the salary to pay for them, people are forced into double jobs, overtime and an unsustainable lifestyle of credit, spending, work and more work. There really is a demonstrable reduction in free time, compared to the 80s.

Sex plays a role as it never did earlier. Always about, nevertheless in Britain and Australia, the percentages of children going the whole hog were less earlier and we just didn’t have the absolute freedom of this current era, where working parents have little control over their progeny and care less than yesteryear. Sure it happened but there was a sort of register in the guy’s minds of which girls would and which girls wouldn’t. My mate and I used to invite certain girls to visit one of our houses when the parents weren’t home but I don’t think we were typical – most of the guys tended more to the booze.

Cutting to the late 80s, I found myself, for a brief period of time, invited to parties with a younger set [why I don’t rightly know] and it was an eye-opener. Now whether it was a particular group of people or whether it was general I have no way of knowing but nooky was just the norm and every room in a house where there was a party used to be occupied, often by more than two.

It wasn’t the guys who surprised – I think it had always been on our minds in any era but it was the new culture of the female ‘OK, if you want’ which shocked me into realizing I wasn’t young any more. I don’t recall any female at any gathering who didn’t go off with someone at some time to some quiet corner. These were all someone’s daughters and there wasn’t even the least tendency to refusal that I could see from any of them. Needless to say I didn’t get any of it and very quickly got out of that culture. I prefer a lady who at least puts up some resistance first.

Drugs are a fraught topic and I caught the edge of the thing before the party drug era. Grass, hash and acid were what were on offer and I was never much into these and finally drifted away from it all, which meant I became a virtual recluse because this thing was happening wherever you socialized. Most of the 70s music was predicated on substances and I had a radio spot playing such things as Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schultz, Can and Eno but it was too much like hard work having to go to programme meetings and organizing things with the producer etc.

It’s becoming harder and harder to identify national differences. In Reykjavic, which I have a connection with, a party is just like any party in the west or in the east for that matter. We found the same thing in Pattaya and world culture is almost frightening the way it is so uniform and so all-consuming. Whether it’s good or not, I don’t know. There’s far more tendency to club, drug and fight someone from another culture than to actually go to war in an organized way.

This has been particularly galling to the Finance, which needs a certain quota of wars up and running at any one time to keep the wheels of business turning but the good thing for them is that the zombie world culture and One Music has produced some quite first rate cannon-fodder, once the religious hatreds are played up to start the ball rolling. And the youth are happily zombyizing themselves today, leaving themselves wide open for the wolves to pick off.

Thus we move into the late 00s.