Happy 1984 Day

~ tidalscribe.com

It is 1964 and in our little house in England we are saying goodbye to my mother’s lifelong friend and her husband. See you in 1984 the adults were saying. I did not get the joke about the year, but 1984 seemed far, far into the future. We were about to emigrate to Australia and the friends planned to visit us in 1984 when the husband retired.

Today is 1984 Day. George Orwell’s novel was published on 8th June 1949 and you can listen to it being read all day ( with breaks and different readers ) on BBC Radio 4. As you will have missed some by the time you read this, it is available on BBC Sounds. If you are elsewhere in the world I am not sure if you might come across it floating in the ether.

I first read 1984 in high school and by that time realised the year 1984 represented ‘the future’ or a future we hoped would not be realised. 1984 still seemed a long way off.

1984 came and went in a flurry of toddlers, nappies and ordinary life, though we paused to contemplate that the future had been and gone and we were having a better time than Winston Smith, well some of us. The next unimaginable future date was 2001, a new century and would it be like the Space Odyssey?

The new millennium started and we hurtled towards a quarter century without yet living on the moon. There is no longer a year number that represents the future. Has Orwell’s novel come true?

Big Brother, or at least someone is always watching. Not only are the final movements of missing people recorded on CCTV, but householders place cameras over their front door as easily as fitting a door bell. Police expect householders to hand over evidence and if you ring someone’s doorbell a disembodied voice will say ‘ Hi Joe you’re early, just walking the dog’ or ‘I’m in Scotland on holiday, can you leave the parcel with the neighbours.’

Thought police? We’ve created them ourselves, calling people out if they appear to be anti-something just because they expressed being in favour of someone or something else, or were overheard making a witty joke. In many countries of course, Thought Police are patrolling social media and journalism.

The 1984 holiday never happened. Mum’s friend’s husband had a degenerative condition that cancelled their holiday plans. You never know what’s going to happen in the future, except it inevitably becomes the past.

How far into the future are you gazing?

27 thoughts on “Happy 1984 Day”

  2. A very thought provoking post.

    I didn’t realise it was 1984 day on radio 4, I’ve just listened to a programme about contact lenses!

    I read 1984 at school, of course I did. It did seem like the far distant future. It was the year I graduated from university, as it happens!

    I agree that we do seem to have a form of Big Brother – not only CCTV, but the internet bots observing our every move and creating algorithms of our likes and dislikes. The Thought Police. Yup – I agree with you there. This does seem to be the era of ‘I’m going to take offence’.

    As for the future, I reached it at the age of 37.

    I had always calculated that when the hugely distant millennium came, I would have reached the unimaginable elderliness of 36.

    It was the oldest I ever foresaw being, so 37 came as a shock!

    After that, I have never really worried about my age, so long as I can get up to all the mischief I want to. I write this as someone who got their LGV truck licence last year (passed first time, I thank you!) and is currently exploring Latvia.

    ,The future is still exciting, even though days ago I was only 60 metres from the Russian border and 70 miles from St Petersburg where Vladimir Putin was sabre rattling about nuclear weapons and military action against the West.

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    1. Yes, being a recycled teenager, as a chap called us once when we were buying senior citizen tickets, turned out to be more fun than I could have imagined. I shall look forward to reading about your latest adventures. Stay safe!

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      1. Thank you!

        Recycled teenager – I like that.

        I really must get blogging. Our internet has been very poor in Estonia, but we’re back in Latvia now, and we have connected.

        Although we have to be very careful because we’re right on the Russian border, so we have to select our network provider to make sure we don’t get charged a fortune for accidentally picking up a Russian mast!

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  3. Janet, it has been a long time since I read 1984, but then again it has been a long time since 1984. I mentioned the other day I have no restriction on how far out to look. If something is several years from now and I have an interest in it, there’s a plan to be a part of it. I’ve always thought having something to look forward to is a big part of what gets us up and moving each day. 🙂

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    1. Excellent thinking Bruce, it must be dire if you have no reason to get up. I have told my family I plan to live to a hundred to annoy them and one has to plan a few things to look forward to in case one lives a very long time!

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  6. Good point about being watched.

    I guess I think we’re beyond 1984. Instead of looking forward, I feel like we have only so much time left before climate disasters get a grip. We keep hearing that something terrible will happen by 2050 or sooner, unless we “act soon.”

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  8. Orwell really did see the future, at least the future in Britain. These days, I try never to look forward further than the end of the month. Life has a habit of interrupting plans.

    Best wishes, Pete.

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  9. I realised a long time ago that to do all I want to do I will have to live well past my hundredth birthday so my focus at the moment is 2050 when I will pass that landmark but I hope I will then still have time to enjoy the fruits of my labour!

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  10. I was only 13 in 1984 so didn’t really think of it as the far future! It’s interesting what you say though about us no longer having a date that represents the future – so many changes have happened in my life time but nothing that quite feels like science fiction yet!

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    1. Hello Andrea, Phones with screens were once the future – Traditional phones and a screen firmly fixed to a table and you sat down at it. Who would have guessed we would be carrying phones around in our pockets and talking to the other side of the world. But yes, we don’t seem to be living in bubbles on the moon as we expected for the 21st century!

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