1965 WASN'T 1965 YET

What history forgets about the people who didn't get invited to the revolution.

There are certain decades which have been issued a uniform. The 1950s wore a neat suit and ate boiled vegetables. The 1960s grew its hair, acquired a sitar and went to London. The 1970s were brown and permanently on strike. The 1980s owned a shoulder pad. Entire nations are apparently expected to have changed personality on the first of January, like somebody turning over the calendar on a very expensive photo shoot.

David Kynaston's Deep into the Sixties: Britain 1965–66 is a useful corrective to this kind of bollocks. Its achievement — across his wider history of postwar Britain — is to put the official excitement alongside the complicated, stubborn continuity of ordinary life. The Beatles were changing popular music; not everybody was listening to the Beatles. London was swinging; a good deal of everywhere else was not. If you were a person in a provincial town doing a difficult job and trying to keep the damp out of your kitchen, it's possible that the arrival of psychedelic possibility was not the day's main event.

We remember periods by their coolest five per cent. Old photographs, extraordinary albums, brilliant clothes and somebody smoking magnificently outside a nightclub. Nobody constructs a nostalgic television montage from an afternoon spent buying paraffin, visiting a relative in hospital or filling in a form. Yet those were lives too, and there were an awful lot more of them.

This habit distorts the present as thoroughly as the past. Imagine a historian looking back at 2026. They'll have an astonishing archive of artificial intelligence launches, billionaires going into space, world leaders arguing online and videos of people putting their dinner in a machine and asking it to tell them what to eat. They'll be able to announce that society lived online, talked endlessly about technology and was becoming rapidly transformed by it.

But did everybody? Somewhere, right now, a plumber is under a sink. Somebody is waiting for a hospital appointment. A teenager is trying to find a way to college. A woman is looking after her father. Someone is standing at a bus stop watching a timetable become fiction. The future is arriving in glossy little bursts, but people continue to inhabit the past, the present and several administrative delays simultaneously.

Which is why the story of a decade is not the same thing as the experience of living through it. A new trend can be everywhere in the media and nowhere in your street. A brilliant invention can exist for years before it changes anything about your life. A revolution can happen on television while you're getting on with the washing-up.

The interesting question isn't what defined 1965. It's who got to decide — and what the rest of the country was doing while they decided it.