What was going on when I was born?

IN his oak-paneled office adorned with Victorian prints of English gentlemen hunting and fishing, Somerset Gibbs was complaining good-naturedly about the boom times in his trade - headhunting for clients in the City of London, Britain's Wall Street. ''The problem for headhunters now,'' he said, grinning, ''is that there's too much business.'' Not just the volume, but the manner, too, of body-snatching has changed markedly, noted the 59-year-old Mr. Gibbs, a former senior partner in a London brokerage house. For years, job-hopping in the square-mile City was conducted by unwritten rules of civility, and the person wanting to leave almost had to ask his boss for permission to leave. ''But now it's all rough and tough and there are lawyers lurking in the background,'' Mr. Gibbs said. ''The old boy's club is disappearing very rapidly.''

AS pressure for higher-density residential development reaches ever deeper into the countryside, property owners who keep horses and use informal networks of equestrian trails are finding their cherished rights coming into conflict with those of neighbors. The growing popularity of riding has made matters worse. Long Island, for example, has about 30,000 horses stabled either in backyards or in commercially run stables, according to William Uhlinger, president of the Nassau-Suffolk Horsemen's Association. A decade ago the number was 10,000. There are even two communities of town houses - planned for Bernards Township and nearby Tewksbury Township in New Jersey - that are being laid out with stables and horse trails as part of their private recreational amenities.

CONGRESS had not even adjourned for the holidays -it did that a couple of days later, in the midst of the capital's first snowstorm this winter - when President Reagan made it clear that 1986 is going to be a year of intense political combat. Speaking to lawmakers who had worked for passage of a measure mandating a balanced budget by 1991, Mr. Reagan said he intended to seek deep cutbacks in ''wasteful and unnecessary'' domestic programs in his proposed budget for 1987. But a senior White House official, speaking less publicly only a couple of hours later, said domestic cutbacks would not be enough. Like Congressional critics of both parties, the official said that either tax increases or sizable cuts in defense outlays would surely be required. The prospect, then, is for a protracted struggle between Capitol Hill and the White House, with each side accusing the other of irresponsibility. Nothing much new about that. But this time, under the provisions of the budget-balancing law, stalemate will produce automatic cuts spread equally between domestic programs and military spending, and President Reagan's proposed budget for 1987, which is to go to Congress in February, will be the first on which the five-year plan will be tested.

An employee of a company that transcribes secret sessions in the House of Representatives has been charged with spying for the Soviet Union after offering to sell an undercover agent secret documents, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said today. The bureau said the suspect, Randy Miles Jeffries, a 26-year-old Washington resident, had told the undercover agent he had already delivered portions of documents to the Russians, including one that was classified as top secret. Michael Giglia, an agent for the bureau, testified today at a hearing in Superior Court that Mr. Jeffries had asked the undercover agent for $5,000 for the complete set of three documents. Mr. Jeffries was arrested at a Holiday Inn at 9:11 P.M. Friday, the F.B.I. said in a statement early today. After today's hearing, a Superior Court judge ordered him held without bail pending a hearing Monday morning in Federal District Court. Mr. Jeffries was the 11th American arrested on spying charges this year.

The suburbs, cities and towns around New York City are struggling with a growing problem of homelessness that is fast overwhelming local support programs, according to officials and advocates for the homeless in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Some of the most affluent communities in Connecticut, New Jersey, Westchester County and Long Island have been caught up in the growing problems of individuals and families living in shelters, hotels, abandoned buildings and even automobiles. Although the experts say the number of homeless people in these areas is smaller than the total in New York City, advocates contend that the potential for suffering is greater outside New York because of the widening gap between what homeless people need and what local and state agencies provide. And the problem is increasingly becoming a national issue. Poverty Amid Affluence ''Growing numbers of homeless men, women and children are not receiving assistance in even some of the most affluent areas surrounding New York,'' said Thomas H. Styron, a co-director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, an organization based in New York City that released a report last week on homelessness in Connecticut. ''Public officials have been extremely slow to respond.''

Lynn Conway, who spent more than 15 years designing computerized systems in California, sold her $500,000 house in Palo Alto not long ago. She moved to the industrial Middle West because, she says, ''this is where the technological action is going to be for the next 20 years.'' George Brostoff, whose $5 million data communications company had roots in California, moved his research and development staff to this rapidly growing university town an hour's drive from Detroit. He says his suppliers here do better quality work than in California. And Electronic Data Systems transferred more than 8,000 employees from Dallas to Detroit to speed General Motors' push to computerize the way it designs, manufactures and sells cars.

MAny of the inland communites in Ocean County, N.J., which offer close proximity to the beach without the prices that usually come with living at the water's edge, are drawing the increasing interest of retirement-age couples. And in recent years, developers have been creating retirement communities to house such couples.

The top military leaders of the Salvadoran guerrilla movement say that they are trying to unite in a single Marxist-Leninist political party. The decision to try to form a Marxist-Leninist party represents the first time the rebel military Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front has publicly defined itself as a Marxist movement. The shift appears to reflect an ideological hardening among the rebels, as well as a narrowing of their public appeal and of the political forces that they once hoped would support them. The decision is one of the strongest indications yet of the growing distance between the five factions that make up the rebel military front and the handful of small social democratic parties that have been allied to them for five years under the banner of the Democratic Revolutionary Front. The social democratic parties have had an increasingly troubled relationship with the armed guerrilla groups. The Democratic Revolutionary Front has consistently defined itself as a supporter of political pluralism, and its senior officials say they will not join the Marxist-Leninist party the rebels hope to form.

The first major manufacturing center to be established for apparel industry companies outside Manhattan will soon open in the South Bronx in a former printing plant for stocks and bonds. The center, at 1241 Layfayette Street between Garrison and Tiffany Streets, will provide space for companies being nudged from their traditional territory in midtown Manhattan by rising rents.

THE story of Upton Sinclair and ''The Jungle'' has receded so far into the back pages of American literary history that it was a bit surprising to see the tale resurrected, if only as a television statistician's ad-lib during a major league baseball All-Star Game. As the game played itself out in a flurry of home runs and fielding errors, a commentator introduced one of those statistics that serve not so much to enlighten as to divert - a televised version of the newspaper sidebar. The script was altogether routine: citation of the baseball statistic from 1906 (''most home runs in an All-Star Game''); transition to author and best seller (''the same year a man named Upton Sinclair published a book called 'The Jungle' ''); tie-in about novelist and hitter having had a good year. Pause. Next pitch. Sinclair's cameo appearance was pretty inconsequential - not unlike other instances since the Bicentennial in which little-known episodes in American history are rendered as a series of ''spots'' on commercial television. But the episode roughly coincided with the purchase of the New York Mets in 1980 by an investment group headed by Doubleday & Company, the parent company of the house that originally published ''The Jungle.'' That acquisition, of course, was only part of a larger pattern of the last 20 years best described in Thomas Whiteside's ''Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing'' (1981) - the diversification of independent houses like Doubleday into entertainment industries; the transfer of once-privately owned publishing houses to multinational conglom-erates (I.T.T., Gult & Western, M.C.A.); the new emphasis on orchestrating books and Hollywood ''concepts'' through million-dollar auctions and promotional tours.

The Congressional session that limped to a close Friday was one of the least productive and most frustrating in recent memory, many members of Congress from both parties say. They complain that Congress repeatedly missed deadlines and got mired in deadlock until it was forced to the point of crisis. Moreover, several lawmakers say the first session of the 99th Congress provided a preview of the pain and turmoil that is likely to prevail next year when members will have to carry out a new budget-balancing law in an election year. For many, the final week of late-night sessions and last-minute solutions seemed to symbolize the entire year. When Congress headed home this weekend, it was 10 weeks after its original goal for adjournment. Even so, the lawmakers left largely for future years' consideration the single biggest problem they faced all year, a gaping budget deficit that is pushing past $200 billion for the current fiscal year.

IN the last few years, New York City has become the kind of town where estranged couples encounter such difficulty finding attractive, affordable accommodations that breaking up is becoming harder and harder to do. This is especially true if the couple, whether married or not, has been living together in a rent-regulated apartment, or a co-op obtained at an insider price, or even an apartment undergoing co-op conversion. For each one faces the possibility of jeopardizing a special claim to an asset that cannot be easily replaced. Rather than storm out, both are therefore digging in. As a result the right to stay put when a live-in relationship or a marriage falls apart, or the right to be fairly compensated for that loss in terms of the realities of the New York marketplace, has become a hotly contested issue that is increasingly being fought over in the courts. ''Every apartment has become a potential battleground,'' said Raoul Lionel Felder, a well-known matrimonial lawyer in Manhattan. ''It's a tremendous problem.'' The difficulty has been compounded, he noted, by recent court decisions that provide no clear-cut direction for the likely actions of a judge. When there are such precedents, negotiated settlements are often easier to reach.