Track 4: No Side To Fall In by The Raincoats

We dance at the office party.

I, an awkward woman smiling in ordinary clothes, watch him: his face, the shape of his buttocks, a tattoo moving as he flexes an arm. I want to hold his head to my breast and say 'I made you'.

"You're our children;" I whisper into his perfect ear, "drunken girls counting off relationships, boys with peacock hair and shimmering skin. We gave birth to you."

Half a lifetime ago, in communal squats, we argued in squalor, trying to escape from men altogether. Dancing, ecstatic, we threw off tradition, staying up for days, gorging ourselves on politics and theory, trying to escape childbirth and factory, kitchen and typing pool.

"We made the eighties by accident."

Like immigrants, we populated industrial spaces and half empty streets, trying to build a society within a society, making our own music and singing our own songs.

Eyes blazing, we wanted equality for all, a vanguard, a victory: youth remaking the world.

Power showed its belly; we promised to subvert it from within.

"We put ourselves first."

I hold him closer.

"We freed you from responsibility and history".

He smiles, too young to see.

"You're too old," he says.