This one’s for the family time capsule, to be read by my great grandchildren in the year 2090.

You won’t have the slightest interest in the 1980s. That’s understandable; nothing much happened. Ignore the Sunday Times’s souvenir magazine, and all the TV programmes which claim to have reviewed the decade; they will only give you the wrong impression.

Most of us didn’t make a fortune in the City. I once found myself in a pub with an old schoolfriend who asked what colour BMW I thought he should order, but that was the closest I carne to anyone who had made a lot of money in front of a computer screen.

I acquired a credit card in 1981, and later, a second one which automatically makes a donation to Oxfam when I use it. But I’m not in debt, have never used a Vodaphone, and still drink tap water.

At the start of the decade I wondered about laying down a few extra cans of baked beans in case of nuclear war. There were television dramas about what would happen, and Martin Amis tried to achieve an appropriate degree of anxiety. At that time every respectable pop video included archive footage of a mushroom