The end of April/start of May 1979 saw two great women come to power – Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister for the first time and I got married!

Forty years on and the UK has its second female PM (well we did at the time of writing!) and Mrs Downes and I are still going strong. We’ve spent the last few weeks looking back at all the good, and the occasional disappointing, events that affected the family through four decades as we celebrated this special anniversary.

There are many more women in regular employment than in 1979

It set me thinking about all the changes that we’ve seen in that time. There are the obvious statistics, such as the number of us that now own a personal computer and smartphone, which didn’t even exist in Maggie’s day. We are living longer on average and, despite ongoing criticism about pay inequality, there are many more women in regular employment than in 1979, something Mrs T would have welcomed.

Standards of living have increased over 40 years, often as a result of dual incomes, meaning that more households own a car and often more than one. In 1979 less than 40% of homes had central heating compared to over 80% today and there was still more than 10% of houses in the UK 40 years ago that had an outside loo.

The credit crisis brought Margaret Thatcher’s vision to its knees

One area in which we’ve let down Mrs Thatcher is the number of people owning their own home. Whilst numbers increased dramatically under her ‘reign’ in the 1980s, the following decade saw the trend reverse sharply and the credit crisis of 2008 and 2009 brought her vision to its knees. It’s never recovered and shows no real signs of doing so.

In 1979 there was no world wide web and therefore would have been nowhere for me to click to research any of these statistics, but at least I wouldn’t have been surgically attached to my mobile phone as I seem to be now!

I wonder what the next 40 years will bring?