Nostalgia. Wonderful thing, even if it can be as indulgent as Mississippi mud pie. So it's no surprise that the second most emailed story on BBC's website today is a piece asking whether we were at our happiest in 1976.
You've clearly got to be rather older than my friend Jo, born in June 1976, to identify with this claim. And immune to the idea that the Seventies were ten years of unremittingly bad news. (Inflation at over 20%; IRA terrorists on the rampage; cars such as the Allegro; power cuts and miners' strikes...)
But 1976 was a special year for many in Britain, thanks to the driest summer since 1772. That spring, aged 12, I celebrated Cardiff City's promotion to the old second division, made all-but-certain with a storming 2-0 win against near-neighbours Hereford United. (I was one of the 35,000 who saw that dramatic night game.) Later, I spent long holiday hours in the heatwave paddling a rubber dinghy in the river at Seaton in Cornwall. And my sister got married in a church surrounded by yellow, drought-hit lawns.
The television highlight was an early BBC fly-on-the-wall documentary Sailor, about the men on board HMS Ark Royal, which featured Rod Stewart's Sailing as its theme. Less successful, perhaps, was ITV's drama about a Labour MP, Bill Brand.
Happy days. Just don't mention the cod war, the assassination of Britain's ambassador to Ireland, the bombing of trains in London and the fact that Big Ben broke down.
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