I was talking to a friend today, a 60+yo man who has lived most of his life in Inverness. We got onto the subject of schooling and he told me he dropped out at 16 to get a job at the local supermarket. He then got a job at the local psychiatric hospital. Since he must have been about 18 when he started it must have been about 1985. I don’t know his exact age.
Anyway he told me the story of when he went into his local bank branch (53 Tomnahurich Street) to borrow £400 (£1275 in today’s money) to buy a CD HiFi system from his local HIFI shop (also on a street very near to my house where we had this conversation). He met the local bank manager in his office up the stairs from the bank branch and was given permission to take a loan to buy this HiFi system. The HiFi shop owner took my friend in a van to his house up the hill (Craig Phadraig is on a hill in Inverness) and set it up for him in his flat. He was supplied with two CDs one of which was Tears for Fears ‘Everybody wants to rule the world.’ Not long after my friend told me he bought his first house. The story itself is quite strange for a Millennial like me (born in 1992) who grew up with cheap portable CD players (made in China) and where we would borrow each other’s CDs to rip on our computers to then burn custom CDs to play. Later we used MP3 players and then iPods came along.
Of course a Generation Z adult reading this will be puzzled even more. In 2026 anyone in the UK can get a Spotify subscription for a tenner a month and listen to every track under the sun. All you need is an internet connection and a smartphone which most people have anyway.
But are we really better off? Rent is higher than ever, the cost to buy and run a car (insurance, fuel, upkeep, initial cost to purchase) is higher than ever, electricity prices are higher than ever, rail prices are higher than ever. Property prices in Scotland on average cost £25.6k in 1985 and now cost £190k. That’s over 640%. And it’s not just a Scottish thing. Why does shelter cost so much in 2026? Surely with better construction materials and techniques the cost would come down over time?
I’ve recently been rereading about Singapore in ‘Stir Fried but not Shaken’ by Terry Tan. I lived in Singapore in 2013. I can’t help but compare and contrast a place like Scotland to Singapore. The island of Singapore is roughly the size of the Island of Mull (on the West coast) with the population of the whole of Scotland. Their population density is among the highest in the world. Singaporean private property is also extremely expensive but it matters less because most of the local residents live in government built social housing called HDBs (Housing and Development Board). I myself was invited into my friend’s parent’s HDB before I left Singapore for China. And Singapore is held up as one of the successful economies of the world. One of the so-called Tiger Economies (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong). I can personally recommend its excellent (and value for money) public transportation, and its hawker culture for eating out and its low crime streets. Of course there are massive differences. Singapore is obviously not a full democracy in the Western sense (despite the name of the state). The People’s Action Party has been in power for 67 years. The newspapers are strictly controlled by the government. Chinese culture is much more studious than Scottish culture (Chinese are the majority ethnic group in Singapore). This can be seen in the PISA education scores of which places like Hong Kong and Singapore are often top (much higher than the USA or Scotland). However critics argue these scores don’t measure critical thinking or creativity. Singapore is on the equator with a rainy season and a non rain season. There is jungle on the island and a tropical climate. It’s also on the other side of the world from Scotland.
Nowadays the bank branch is short term and residential accommodation which is rather fitting for 2026. No street in the town centre of Inverness has been unaffected by AirBnB. And the HiFi shop is now a Chinese takeaway. I didn’t ask my friend if he still has the HiFi system today. We listened to ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ as we closed the conversation.
Leave a Reply