Last night in Ealing, Twenty-teens

By the end of the 1920s, the world was slumping into Depression; by the end of the 1930s, it was at war. Eighty years later, we lived through the global economic crisis - ten years on, there's no major European conflict, but things are generally nastier than they were in 2010. As I observed here, we reached a tipping point towards the end of 2012 - that great year of the London Olympics and the Euro 2012 football championships across Poland and Ukraine. Since then - Putin invades Ukraine, Kaczyński, Brexit, Trump. Not unrelated phenomena. Will things get better? Will things get worse?

A new decade beckons - this will be the eighth that has touched my life. Had my father made it a couple more months, he'd have been experiencing his 11th - only his memories of the 1920s are deeper than mine of the 1950s.

I look to the skies and hope - and hope. I live in hope. The sky is clear, the sun has just gone down. A short walk is in order. On another short walk earlier today, I had the insight that maybe Good - the quality of goodness - is a physical property - like mass and energy - a universal goal, a target, an ambition, something naturally striven towards. Three steps forward, two steps back but over the millennia, we're moving in the right direction, haltingly, unsure of ourselves, full of doubts - are we any the wiser? It would be smug to say "I think so"; it would be overly pessimistic to answer "no".

Cleveland Road; come May, it will be 50 years since we moved in. Before that, the Dysons owned the house for 37 years since it was built. Cleveland Rd looked much like it did in the 1930s, here and there the occasional new development (like the one on the corner of Highview Rd), but the spirit of place remains. Bombs fell on Cleveland Rd during the Blitz but spared the houses along this stretch.

Here is Castlebar Park station; I remember one foggy evening in early 1970; my parents were house-hunting and had narrowed the search down to Cleveland Road. My father took me for a walk to see it, half-an-hour from home on Croft Gardens. We did, I liked it. It had atmosphere, it had spirit of place, it was posh, it was 1930s, Art Deco. On the way home, we walked down to Castlebar Park Halt, as it was called at the time. No trees, no CCTV, just two dimly-lit platforms and a footbridge. In the far distance, to the north, lights in the fog, the diesely purr of a green railcar, running the shuttle service between Greenford and Ealing Broadway. We alighted two stops down the line at West Ealing and walked home from there. My mind was full of impressions; Edwardian England, country railway branch lines, clerestory coaches, oil-lit halts, milk churns - and 1930s England, posh houses, cocktail cabinets, zigzag patterns, eau-de-Nil wallpaper, starchy perfumes, proper oak flooring and staircases.

May the 2020s run smoothly, please - no wars, no disasters, no mass outbreaks of evil. A quiet, boring decade will do me fine.

"...Take me back to Ealing/When the evening ends."

- Ian Dury

This time last year:
The Day the World Didn't End

This time four years ago:
Hybrid driving - the verdict

This time six years ago:
Pitshanger Lane in the sun

This time 10 years ago:
Miserable, grey, wet London

This time 11 years ago:
Parrots in Ealing

This time 12 years ago:
Heathrow to Okęcie