Our hair was big and our pop music was bouncy (if you didn't count The Smiths). A particular favourite of mine was Mental as Anything's 'Live it Up' (below), which never failed to boost my spirits.
We'd somehow successfully navigated the threat of Nuclear war, oil running out and the closure of the pits and most of us looked forward to the future.
Clothes and pop music were eagerly devoured with the lines to all our favourite songs learned from 'Smash Hits' magazine or 'Jackie'. Pop star pull-outs lined our bedroom walls.
No one cared about looking like a supermodel. In fact we only had models. Supermodels hadn't yet been invented. However we accepted that very few people looked like a model and were happy with 'pretty' and aspired, if anything, to 'girl next door' in terms of looks. That winning combination of wholesomeness and prettiness.
Drugs were virtually unheard of in the Irish town where I grew up. Glue sniffing was about it and many of us bought (or were bought) a single of 'Just Say No!' by the Grange Hill cast. Our teachers still walked around with a cane under their arm (at least in my first year) - gesture enough to keep the vast majority of us in line at school - as we knew they had the power to use it.
When I did school work experience on my local newspaper and was paired with Don, the 'Courts & Sports' reporter, crime was low level. the odd stolen ladder or charity box. Father Ted genre crimes.
While our homes tended to be decorated in various shades of brown and our parents' cars beige, we ourselves were colourful and any clothing, particularly involving a fluorescent zigzag paired with a RaRa skirt, was a must. We also loved experimenting with make up and hair.
We enjoyed thriving shops, libraries, community centres, pubs, cinemas and nightclubs. Banks, Post Offices and ticket offices were plentiful as were jobs. If we wanted something we generally had to work for it and save for it, but that made the acquiring of it all the sweeter. You had to be about 50 with a mortgage to be trusted by the bank with a credit card. Luckily our cheque books and cash did us just fine.
If we had time to feel blue from our busy social lives, we just felt blue for a while. No one called it 'depression' or 'anxiety'.
You had to sit and wait for the phone not to ring to get your heart broken, not have it mercilessly shattered within seconds of checking on your love interest's internet or mobile phone activity.
No one seemed to worry about their weight or what they had or hadn't been blessed with in the body part lottery. Or at least if they did, they never talked about it. Life was for living, for getting on with.
Fast forward to today and we have a society which seems ever more miserable and fearful, even though it's never known more material goods and comfort and enjoys international travel we could only dream of!
We have allergies that kill us (as oppose to merely being a nuisance) and people with anxiety and depression from a young age.
Yes, we have tackled many of our 'isms', but as societal acceptance has grown, other intolerances seem to have risen up to take their place. In the good old days friends could have a difference of opinion without falling out over it. That level of diversity seems to have evaporated. I believe we have also become less caring about each other and more selfish as a nation. I remember people sticking up for each other and helping each other as communities. I remember respect for the elderly. What happened? And how could social isolation become the number one social ill in an unprecedented era of electronic connectivity?
Social mobility was also important. Now most wealth is going one way - in an upwards direction - to those who already have far too much of it. This is having a crippling effect on the rest of the economy, akin to a tourniquet cutting off the blood supply to the rest of the body. Debt has been turned into credit - abracadabra!
Our tramps (who often took to the road by choice) have been replaced by homeless in ever increasing numbers.
Addictions of all varieties are skyrocketing and it is not uncommon to find people in their 20s complaining of a level of ill health they might have expected to encounter in their 60s.
As if we needed any more woes, we are warned there is a 'climate emergency' but are not told what we are supposed to do about it, apart from worry and find ourselves fleeced for ever more taxes, greener cars, greener boilers etc, usually within a few short years of replacing the previous for environmental reasons.
The TV news has almost become a no go area with its carpet-bombing of doom and gloom.
Perhaps that is why we still find so much 80s music playing everywhere we go. It reminds us all of how life should be. Buoyant and optimistic. Looking forward to a bright future!
I for one refuse to live in fear. Let's all make this our mantra.
2 comments:
Great picture you've painted.
I also found it very thought provoking.
Have we just forgotten the bad bits?
e.g. With absence the heart grows fonder, and all that?
How can we measure happiness?
Thanks for your lovely comment Anonymous.
Yes of course there were bad things about the 1980s, but what I wanted to focus on was general change in societal attitude. Life just seemed more real and more valued and people more valuable, I guess.
For all our talk of environmentalism, it seems to me we live in an increasingly throwaway society, on every level, even human.
Post a Comment