In the Dark

Twitter reminded me this morning that it’s twenty years to the day since the Labour Party under Tony Blair swept to a landslide victory in a General Election. ‘Things can only get better’ was the anthem of the times.

How things have changed.

Twenty years on Labour is in disarray, the United Kingdom is more divided than ever, and we’re about to crash out of the European Union. From where I’m standing things can only get worse. And a lot worse, at that.

Anyway, going back to 1997, I remember that the election happened while I was in America; I had cast  postal vote before going on the trip. On the day, I went to a party at the house of a British colleague. Because of the time difference the results came in during the evening there, rather than the early hours of the morning as they would have done at home.

When it became clear that Labour had won, I was already a bit tipsy and decided to celebrate by going to a tattoo parlour to be commemoratively inked. I left with this.

The ‘New Labour’ symbol was a red rose..

The photograph was taken some years after the event, at a conference in Italy. I still have the tattoo, of course, although it has faded a bit (like the rest of me). Among other things,  it reminds me of a time – not too far in the past – when there seemed to be a future.

This entry was posted on May 1, 2017 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Biographical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.