The Roaring Twenties

One of the surprising things about turning 30 last week was how quickly it was to look back on my twenties as an easily definable period of my life. Opened in 2000, closed in 2010, a neat and tidy decade to file away with the follies of youth. The world doesn't always work this way. For example, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm identified a long 19th century (which ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914) and a short 20th century (which ended with the collapse of communism in 1991). It is therefore extremely likely that many lives also cannot be conveniently divided into decades like pieces of birthday cake, but seem instead to be one sticky pile of chronological dough that refuses to take any recognisable form. A messy clump of years.

So I'm reasonably happy with this tidy, well-ordered gift to hindsight that, should I ever inflict an autobiography on this world, will neatly fit into one chapter entitled something awful like 'The Wild Years'. My first, rather modest order of business as I stare forward at this gaping, blank slate of a decade, is to yet again try to maintain this blog on a regular basis. This will range from the usual (currently extremely sporadic) output of articles and poems, to simply pasting links to news items or videos that I feel like sharing. I'll say it now publicly so that there's no reneging on this promise to myself: Anyone who visits Quality Footwear regularly will find frequent updates and new material.

Timothy Garton Ash has been a regular source of quotations on this blog so far. Presumably unwittingly, he also played a part in the course that my twenties took. It was reading his book The File in my late teens that definitively tipped the balance in favour of my later choosing, aged 20, to study in Berlin as opposed to one of the more picturesque and venerable southern German university towns like Freiburg or Heidelberg. Likewise, his writings on the Solidarity movement inspired me to attempt to learn Polish in 2001. Although I later switched to Russian, it was those long-gone snowy afternoons drinking tea by candlelight with my Polish teacher in an unrenovated, crumbling Prenzlauer Berg tenement block that cemented my passion for the strange new (or renewed) geographical and cultural entity known as Central Europe.

It is fitting, therefore, to celebrate this new decade's resolution with a video of a recent talk given by Garton Ash on his latest book, Facts are Subversive. Highly recommended if you have 27 minutes to spare. Hearing him refer to a pedantic colleague as the 'Ayatollah of fact-checking' seems to make it be worth the virtual journey alone.