A 1980s Childhood (24 page)

As I look back at my experience of school in the eighties and compare it to the experiences of my two daughters today, I realise that there are a lot of similarities. Schools in any decade will have eccentric teachers, playground crazes and glockenspiel lessons. Children will always write 58008 on their calculators and then turn them upside down and giggle, and teachers will always know less about new technology than the pupils they are trying to teach it to. But there was something very special and distinctive about school in the eighties; something that cannot ever be recreated, cannot be preserved and can only be remembered by those who were actually there. It was a potent mix of the music, the movies and the fashions of the decade that influenced the way we thought, behaved and dressed. The atmosphere of the time was charged with politics and world events that we’ll never see the likes of again, and the technologies we thought were so advanced at the time have disappeared into history forever, replaced by new technologies we could never have dreamed would be possible.

Nowadays, when I play that old ZX Spectrum game ‘Skool Daze’ on my super-fast modern PC, I still have no idea what I’m doing, where I’m meant to be or what the point of the game is. But, you know what I realised? It doesn’t matter because I made it through the real thing.

First published in 2012

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