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Published: 31 December 2019

We have thus also ended a decade which was perhaps the most significant in my life. In the early 80's I had been working hard at my business, Comart, and in 1983, the IBM personal computer had been launched and was carrying all before it in America and promising to do the same here. I was struggling to hold together fellow-members of the BMMG and was unsure that my fellow executives in Comart had the talent, experience and dedication to help me manage Comart through another difficult transition of product development and market re-entry.

Expecting our third child, I was philosophical and looking for a change of pace of life. Elsewhere in 1983 we had seen a year of strange weather patterns with the British February gales that felled millions of trees and Ethiopian droughts that threatened millions of people. Bush fires in Australia and tragic Italian cinema and cable-car accidents and rising shooting incidents in the U.K. Union-bashing was then the norm with Murdoch and Wapping as one example and the Miner's Strike another.

Thatcher had won another term after the Falklands euphoria and was gradually introducing more-and-more extreme policies. We had the "benefit" of the first year of breakfast television.

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Read more: The 1980's