Oliver's Army and Mrs Thatcher

It was a warm Spring in 1979. Nowadays people seem to spend their gap years on a beach in Thailand: I spent mine in various offices in Cardiff. By 'eck, though, I knew no different: expectations were lower in those days.

In the autumn I was about to start a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education course at University College, Cardiff, but meanwhile I got a six-month job as a clerk in the Customs and Excise branch of the Civil Service, doing something dull to do with VAT.

It was an easy job to start with and then after a couple of weeks the computer, which provided me with my work, went on strike. Or, presumably, the people who worked it went on strike. It was all the same to me: it meant that I spent six months in the Civil Service doing absolutely and completely nothing. Well, nothing to do with the Civil Service, anyway: I used my time very profitably and read all the books I needed for my teacher training course. And the government paid me to do it at a positively luxurious £49 per week.

The people I worked with were lovely - Bob, an ex-policeman in his fifties, and Julie a lively girl a bit younger than me became my friends. We had an interminable game of cards going on in the breaks between work (or, in my case, between reading books about children and teaching). I have no idea now what game it was but it was one where you won tricks and the game just went on and on, day after day, week after week "You've got 396 tricks, Bob, and Daphne's got 262."

As I said, it was a warm Spring and ice-creams were a necessity every afternoon. It was a war of nerves. We all sat there in silence wondering who would crack first. Finally someone would leap to their feet and sing a bit of Elvis Costello's Oliver's Army:

Oliver's Army are here to stay
Oliver's Army are on their way

and then the whole department would join in the chorus

And I would rather be anywhere else
Than here today

Then the person who started it would have to take orders and go and get everyone's ice-creams.

But there was darkness coming - or harmony, truth, faith and hope, depending on your point of view. One day there was a knock at my front door in Splott (yes, really, it's a part of Cardiff, I'm not making it up) and there on the step stood the Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, with Michael Foot. We lived in Jim's constituency, though I noticed he always referred to it as Cardiff Bay rather than Splott. And Jim and Michael were canvassing for the election.

Which, of course, they lost - and probably deserved to lose. They were not a great Labour government, and the country wanted change. So it's partly their fault that Margaret Thatcher got into power. You can watch her speech as she arrived at Number Ten here. Putting her perfectly-coiffed head on one side in that way that Cecil Parkinson used to fantasise about, she said, quoting St Francis of Assisi,

"Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope."

She failed on all four, of course. The whole ethos of the country seemed to change in May 1979. I'm still waiting for it to change back.