The 80s

I'm currently listening to the 80s Movie Hits album (it was "acquired" shall we say) and listening to it, as you'd probably expect, brought back memories... being six in 1980 and sixteen in 1990, it was pretty much my formative years (though I became an adult in the 90s but for the life of me I cannot remember half as many songs from the decade fashion forgot...)

When I went to watch Hot Fuzz last weekend with a mate of mine from those days, there was a boy about six in the queue and it dawned on me: was I ever that small?

I can remember having our first betamax VCR in about 1980/81 and this was before the Video Recordings Act... no wonder I turned out like I have!

Being "of that age" girls featured on the horizon, though being shy and fat with NHS specs didn't exactly help matters (mind you, I still have a sad memory of making a girl cry for not accepting her Valentine's Card when I was seven - Sally, if you're reading this, sorry).

And let's not go where Kelly le Brock and Molly Ringwald featured in my thoughts, shall we?

I still reckon many of the "teen" films from the 80s still stand today, many of whom penned by John Hughes, with Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off being two of my favourites. Not to mention Flashdance - if only all welders looked like Jennifer Beals. ;-)

And the music? What can be said of the music - sheer joy! And I mean that... and this is a great site to relive those memories. The first tape I ever purchased was a Madness album, and even though I loved listening to the chart rundown on Sunday evening I didn't actually buy a lot of music.

I did, though, buy a lot - not to mention copy a lot - of games for my trusty Spectrum 48k then later the 128k +2, not to mention the magazines Your Sinclair, Sinclair User and Crash (I bet you were expecting me to say Fiesta then, weren't you? I was too young to buy that... but naturally if one of my mates' older brother happened to have a copy lying around...)

The 80s were definitely the boom-time for computer enthusiasts, and it was all down to Sir Clive: back then, I loved to wrangle with code, but now computers do leave me rather cold; they aren't simple any more, rather costly affairs, with a cumbersome operating system. Back then, it was easy: LOAD "" and press play on tape, even changing the screen and printing your name was a cinch:

• 10 CLS
• 20 PAPER 0; INK 7
• 30 PRINT "Hello Chris"
• 40 GOTO 20

What's that in C++ or HTML? Well, I did know what it would be in C but like many things I studied in College, C++ syntax has all but vanished from memory...

Anyway, I'm an adult now and I don't have kids - the closest are my two nieces, the eldest of which is twelve - going on twenty - and watching her grow-up both fills me with dread (she's not a kid any more) but also a wry smile at my own memories of when I were that age, though I think (hand on heart) it was a more innocent time; there seems to be more of a pull for kids to grow-up faster today. I'm probably all rose-tinted spectacles, and my parents' generation probably thought the same as when my generation was growing up, but the fashions, music and films for pre-teen and teens today seem to be older.

Or perhaps I am just an old man, but I don't think we had a similar artist to Snoop Dogg or whatever in the 80s...

Anyway, just some rambling memories - the boss isn't in today, and you don't actually expect me to do work, do you?