Thirty years ago last Wednesday, John Lennon was shot and killed outside his New York apartment. At that time, I was paying the rent by working in a trendy whole-food complex in Covent Garden, London.
It was just the sort of place in which, had he lived in London, Lennon would have been right at home. Neal's Yard was a magnet for hippies, backpackers and other refugees from the '70s, along with would-be therapists of every conceivable kind.
There was a wholefood warehouse, a bakery, a mill, a creamery and an apothecary. Oh, yes, and unrelated to this collective of enterprises, the Neal's Yard Abattoir, a creative industries studio, cocking a studied snook at the beaded, be-ringed, pierced and peaceable folk who otherwise populated the yard.
The people I worked with didn't do irony, but were big on macrobiotic diets or acupuncture, veganism or osteopathy, Bach flower remedies and primal scream therapy.
They were generous and friendly. They liked to "share". And I suspect I was something of a disappointment, wholemeal bread and miso paste being about the extent of my flirtation with the prevailing alternative lifestyles. So, although familiar with the vocabulary, I was never really fluent in the language: I didn't get the whole John and Yoko gig.
Even then I didn't appreciate that Lennon was the truly original Beatle, a singular failure of the imagination and a hangover from earlier times, the '60s, when we all bagsed our favourite - and mine was invariably Paul.
When my Nana died in 1964, we were living in Apia, Western Samoa, and Mum hurried off back home to the funeral - no easy feat in those days. But she made it and came back with the Beatles For Sale LP.
We wore it out and, by the time Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, the band were part of our lives and consciousness and informed and infiltrated all those impressionable experiences - like first crushes with the High Commissioner's daughter, who wore a little white dress and shimmied mesmerisingly through the entire album at her birthday party at the big house on the hill. It must have been late 1967.
Abbey Road came with adolescence, long hair and all the hormonal highs and lows of the age, a song or a tune for every occasion. By that time, it was all beginning to fall apart, and the Beatles eventually split in 1969.
I didn't necessarily blame Yoko but, unlike John, I suspect I wasn't quite ready to grow up and move on.
The other night, there was an excellent documentary on television: The US versus John Lennon. It told of his fraught relationship with his adopted country and the lengths to which the Nixon administration was prepared to go to deport the outspoken "peacenik". For Ono and Lennon had turned their lives into a protest against the Vietnam War and were prepared to speak out on behalf of numerous other causes of the day.
Lennon's sense of humour, his commitment to justice and peace, his original thinking and quick wit were evident throughout.
Although he was only 40 when he died - like the Kennedys and Martin Luther King of that peculiarly American disease, assassination - he is the one that has, beyond the collective identity and extraordinary cultural import of the band, etched his name in history.
Thirty years have passed since Mark David Chapman gunned him down. Premature death often creates a legend and perpetuates it, but in Lennon's case the legend would have lived regardless.
About the time the Beatles began to record in 1960 in Liverpool, a little ways north in Manchester, another cultural phenomenon was getting under way. Coronation Street, which this month marked 50 years of continuous production, was the first mass market television serial that consciously set out to show the lives of working people in the northwest of England.
Produced by the commercial channel Granada TV in opposition to the BBC, the project produced considerable disquiet in the hierarchy of the organisation. Whoever would want to watch such a show?
Within six months, it had an audience of millions. No account of the cultural history of the second half of the 20th century would be complete without it.
• Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) of the Otago Daily Times.
