Michael Young

In other years I would say, how pretty they are, The cherries outside our house. This autumn I see the first leaves Writhe from the green into the yellow and From the yellow into what seems a frantic red Before they corkscrew to their conclusion When the morning wipers scrape them from the windscreens To drop them in the dog shit on the pavement. Their beauty has not brought them mercy.

The...

What has happened to ageing cannot be understood without comparing how things are with how things were before industrialisation, when society was to a considerable extent no more than the family writ large, and the family straddled all ages. The family was responsible for the production of food, for education, a good deal of religious practice, for such entertainment as there was and for controlling those members of all ages who stayed within its fold. As the economy was based on agriculture, and as most people were at the margin of subsistence (or below it when the harvest was bad), outside the landowning classes everybody who could work had to work, irrespective of age. Who would not toil should not eat.

I do not see how Professor Fishman could do more than he has done to convince us that he was there in 1888, qualified as only an eyewitness can be to guide us 1988ers through the streets of Tower Hamlets as they were, and are, to him. We can walk with him downwind and eastwards from the Mansion House and are soon slowed by the all-pervading smell of poverty and filth as we traverse streets with the same names – Great Alie Street, Flower and Dean Street, Bethnal Green Road. Can he be right when he says of the crowds around us that the men and women stepping through the midden are too poor to afford underclothes? Can this angular man see where we can’t among the organ-grinders, the kerb acrobats and the fire-swallowers? He reads out a letter to the Times which refers to an event of November 1888:’