About the 1980s

The recent trend for turning yourself into a neon shell-suit wearing 1980s fashion victim made me look back at one of my personal favourite photos of that era.

I reckon that I am three years old here. The dress I'm wearing I also wore to my other nannas 60th birthday in the April of 1986.

Look at those hair dos. My beautiful trendy cousins were fully embracing the styles this time without a neon fire hazard or leg warmer in sight. Tie and sharp suits for my Grandad and Uncle.

Nanna and Grandad who we are huddled around here had four children. My Dad was the first to arrive in 1938. I arrived in 1983 and grew up quite conscious of how lucky I was to be born into such a colourful decade. The music, the fashion, decent TV and the absence of a close war.

Nanna loved film. When I think of the first person who introduced me the beauty of keeping written records about items it was my Nanna Hannah. She had a good sized collection of VHS where she had recorded black and white films from the TV so that she could rewatch them. She had a little notebook with all her films catalogued to remember what was on offer.

I'm pretty sure it was my Nanna Hannah who told me that there was little plastic tab on the VH cassette that you could remove that prevented it from every being re-recorded over. I could not comprehend her love of black and white films which to me were so dated. I was born in the neon era where colour was everywhere and my childish escape was into cartoon land where American Care Bears were talking about their emotions and feeling in a way that no human I knew did.

TV was such an important part of our lives. Watching entertainment that made us laugh and cry and connect generations. But also large parts of our lives was scheduled around it with my evening starting with neighbours before mum and dad had finished work for the day. The scheduling of only 4 channels helped us understand the collective impact or our actions. Like how boiling the kettle and brewing up during the adverts impacted the surge on the national grid. Not like now where we have no idea if the trend for AI generated 1980s images was a total waste of hot water or what impact it had on anything.

I'd love to know what my nanna's would make of the technology we use today.

Jen x