Non-fiction book: looking for someone aged 75+ to talk about changes in British life

£70 an hour to talk about the Good Old Days and how we’re all going to hell in a handcart?
Form an orderly queue.

I find this n interesting proposition because recently I have begun to get exasperated by modern readings of past behaviour.

For example in all the talk of Boomers and current difficult work prospect for young people. people seem to have completely forgotten how desperate circumstances were in the 1980s, with children begging round tube stations in London and mile after mile of derelict buildings with for let or for sales signs alongside the M1 between London and Yorkshire, and no doubt further north but I just drove the London - Yorkshire bit. 3 million unemployed.

The thousands and thousands of house repossessions in the late 1980s, when homes on the lower end of the price scale halved in value over a year.

Things aren't good now but compared with the 1980s, people are living in clover.

My caution about this is that this author is looking at one person only and that will give a totally distorted picture. The attitudes and behaviour I remember, will be entirely different to, for example, MawsRosie who has posted above me, or anyone else who has posted on this thread above my post, or posts onward, or who ignores this thread competely.

To do what this writer says he wants to do. He needs to talk to at least 6 different people carefully chosen to represent a wide variety of back grounds and lives.

The anecdotal evidence of one person is worthless.

@M0nica Thank you for this. And yes, that's exactly my proposition. Most forecasts around how technology will change our lives are essentially taken from either scholarly reviews or other predictions, but I am interested more in the lived experience of people.

As per the point about representativeness and needing to interview more people, I am onboard and in fact, I have already spoken to several people. I have representative surveys behind the writing as well, so interviews are really just to provide more narrative and personal stories as I think that's what ultimately brings it to life

I am very wary of representative surveys, because when they get written up they get generalised.I can remember a man called, I think, David Cannadine, wrote a book about Britain in the 1950s.

Through out he was making broad generalisations of how Britain was, based on any figure from 40% upwards, but even if 70% did something - then 30% didn't. I doubt if one family in the country was 'average';

I remember the 1950s and the life he described as what Britain was like then, was totally alien to me, yet I was brought up in a perfectly ordinary middle-income family.