This Is Now: A World Inhospitable to Inbetweeners and Some Strategies for Living between Worlds

Abstract

If she wasn’t sure about when the inhibiting sensible world into which she was born began to change, Margery Cross was much more certain about when it had ended. ‘Oh, the sixties! You had it, especially the people who were in their teens or twenties in the sixties, you had everything, you were free, you didn’t have to get married and be like your mum and dad. You started to have a bit of money in your pocket and you listened to records and bopped all day long. It started in the fifties really and carried through. They say if you can remember the sixties you weren’t there, but for most of us it were more a case of going to work and getting your weekends free, you know, but we suddenly had a lot more freedom. So I guess it would be the sixties.’ What came next — the after-life of the twentieth-century Interregnum — is the subject of this chapter. To repeat what I said earlier in this book, the Interregnum is the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the twentieth century. It is the mechanism pivotal to understanding the shift from solid modernity to liquid modernity, and the changes it wrought are at the very heart of the lives and times of the Inbetweeners. When the Interregnum ended is a puzzle we are unlikely ever to be able to solve with any certainty.