Herbert Brush goes to the pictures to see ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and is disappointed to discover it is ‘a picture for children rather than grown-ups’. A lot of time is spent cleaning and shopping, and cinema and books, allotments and museums are the principle routes of leisure. These five live in a world where most food still comes in tins, where sheets must be mended until they’re unusable anymore, where the line between childhood and the adult world is clearly delineated. It should probably be read by anyone complaining about modern times. ‘Our Hidden Lives’, edited by Simon Garfield, tells the stories of just five diarists who carried on writing – a bored young woman, a bad-tempered accountant, a Sheffield housewife, a London pensioner and a gay antique dealer all wrote about how they lived. It makes for fascinating reading.īut there’s another book which in a way is better because it’s more focussed. A book, (I think it was called ‘Speak For Yourselves’ – I have it somewhere, still packed in a box) tells the stories of these wartime diarists.

Most diarists stopped writing at the end of the war but some carried on through the so-called Austerity Years. Eventually over a million pages made their way to a storage facility in Falmer near Brighton. The Mass Observation Society asked men and women across the country to keep a wartime diary. At the time, several others were thinking like him it was time for government to understand how ordinary lives were lived from day to day.

The anthropologist Tom Harrison returned from the South Pacific after looking for cannibals, and reached a startling conclusion remote tribes were less interesting than the people of Bolton, where he lived. Okay, so Post-Brexit is shaping up to be horrible, but if you think you’re about to have it bad, maybe you should look back to Post-War.

Our hidden lives simon garfield