Fordyce Maxwell: 'Dances were more likely to see a beery punch-up than a joint-fuelled love-in'

IT'S not so much traditional as compulsory to mark anniversaries ending with a zero – a first anniversary and ones ending with a five are only slightly less popular – so in the past few weeks the BBC has been giving a 1968 retrospective big licks.

As has many a journalist. Did every now middle-aged columnist in Britain take part in the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam protest that year or head for Paris for the student riots in May? Or protest against Russian tanks entering Czechoslovakia to remove the liberal prime minister Alexander Dubcek and send him off to manage a forest? Or against Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech or the shooting of Martin Luther King?

Reading many of their recent efforts it would seem so. My inferiority complex has flourished accordingly and my vague theory that history's great events passed me by while I was trying to earn a living has become a conviction.

That feeling was already latent. The line about "if you can remember the Sixties you weren't there" never applied as much to young farm workers in Northumberland as it allegedly did to the new generation in Soho and the Cavern, but it did make those of us outside London and Liverpool feel we were missing something.

What was swinging and where, and why not in our direction? Even packed Haggerston Castle weekend dances were more likely to produce a beery punch-up than a joint-fuelled love-in.

There were few flowers in our hair at village dances when my coolest Sixties look was white shirt, black cords and Chelsea boots. My worst was suede jerkin, bri-nylon shirt and knitted tie.

Public history is recorded in detail in print, sound and film, as the BBC has proved frequently in the past few weeks. It has proved more difficult to reconstruct a year from memory and a few jotted football results and cricket scores, but the big happenings for me in 1968 were:

Moving from Perth to Glasgow after my first year in journalism, convinced that I was on my way to fame if not necessarily fortune; the wettest summer for years with miserable hay-making and a lousy harvest as I worked week-ends and holidays on the farm; a rare 10-wicket win in a low-scoring game, 19 not out while Johnny Bryson clattered a quick 44; playing fullback for Outrams when we lost the final of Perth Trades Cup to Perth Infirmary (staff, not patients); the engine blowing up on my pride and joy fourth-hand Sunbeam Rapier; reporting the first of what turned out to be – how grateful we should be not to know the future – 38 consecutive Highland shows.

I do remember some important events outside my small world. Of course I do. Manchester United won the European Cup. Bob Beamon defied gravity in the Mexico City Olympics long jump. 'Hey Jude' topped the charts.

But did I, before Google helped, remember the Tlatelolco massacre of 300 students before the Olympics? Afraid not. Or that Rhodesia's rulers hung several black men, defying a Queen's reprieve, or that France again vetoed UK entry to the European Union? Sorry. Or that Stevie Wonder had the nerve to sing 'Shoo-Bee-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day'?

It's frightening what passed me by.