If Trevor ever approached you in the city centre, all urine-stained jogging bottoms and uncomfortable familiarity, asking for change towards his train fare home, you wouldn’t hesitate to dig deep – perhaps handing over your £1000 smart phone too so he could check the Central Station timetable.
That’s why I believed this establishment-approved Knight of the Realm when he said UFOs were real. The year was 1994 – the fag end of true reality, a few years before the mass fractionalisation, isolationism and grotesque self-glorification bequeathed to us by the digital dawn. No phones, no internet, your gran could whistle the Top Ten and 30 million folk watched Coronation Street. Before Xhamster, Ken Barlow’s rampant bed-hopping was all teenagers had to learn about sex.
This vacuum of yawning nothingness allowed for mass pop culture crazes that infected entire continents with short-lived delirium – and in 1994, the brow of the globe’s collective consciousness was hot and sweaty with X-Files fever.
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