Today we’ve got a couple of 1981 photos of Mum and Dad (and Granny!) standing next to what seems to be an Opel Manta B. Looks like a nice spacious car!
I came across an interesting article about why cars went from boxy to curved during the ’90s. I wonder if angular cars will ever make a comeback?
Bonus picture of Mum and Granny next to the car. I love Granny’s coat!
More ’80s stuff (possibly cars) next week.
Here’s Mum standing next to another car in the ’80s! With me, as it’s now 1985.
Judging by the car registration date (thanks gov.uk for this handy lookup feature!) and pictures online, this looks like a Ford Sierra. I suspect it was one of the Fords that Dad used to hire to get around Shetland before we owned our first family car. They always seemed to be blue for some reason!
More old ’80s stuff next week.
I’ve been working on both of my ’80s chart playlists this week: my ‘proper’ one, which is ongoing as part of my decade-long video-watching project (explained last week), and my ‘holding playlist’ for favourite tracks I’m yet to get to. Strangely, given that it’s only the alphabet that separates them, the two lists seem to have slightly different tones; the first seems to contain more serious tracks, while the second is more frothy. Maybe it’s just the particular tunes that seem to be coming up regularly at the moment!
An exception to the trend is one of my favourite tracks by a band from the latter half of the alphabet, Soft Cell. ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’ is beautiful and epic and not at all frothy, and I was privileged to see it performed live when Geth and I saw Marc Almond at Electric Dreams 2018 (though I was less impressed by the audience members wearing inflatable pink flamingoes, as I feel the song deserves a little more reverence).
The video is early ’80s perfection and I’m always disappointed when nightclubs don’t look like this. Not that I go to nightclubs that often these days, even in non-pandemic times!
I don’t remember Mum and Dad ever buying singles. When I was a kid, singles were what *I* bought (generally on cassette because it was a quid cheaper than CDs, and also because when I first started buying them we didn’t actually have a CD player in the house). What Mum and Dad did have, as far as I knew, was:
During the Christmas 2019 divvying up of vinyl, I was surprised when Dad produced a fairly substantial pile of 7-inch singles that I had never seen before, some of them dating back to the late ’50s. I didn’t expect there to be any ’80s goodies in there, due to my aforementioned memory of Mum and Dad never buying singles – I assumed the 7-inch collection must all have been from their teenage years – but I was wrong!
‘Total Eclipse…’ and ‘Say Say Say’ are both 1983 classics, but ‘I Know Him So Well’ was released as a single in December 1984 – the month before I was born. It appeared to be the most recent 7-inch in Mum and Dad’s collection when I went through it – so maybe it was parenthood that put an end to their single-buying!
Anyway, these tiny slices of the ’80s belong to me now, and I really need to fire up my own record player and give them a spin someday. Much more special than burying them in my ’80s Spotify playlist!
*Nothing to do with Chatterley, the Beatles, sex or anything else that Larkin wrote about. 1963 saw the first episode of Doctor Who, and so that’s when the 20th century became properly interesting as far as I’m concerned.
**Pre-pandemic in the late ’10s I used to love going into branches of HMV, heading up to the music floor, and seeing that it was all vinyl and cassette tapes once again – not a CD in sight!
I have a mega-playlist on Spotify for ’80s chart hits that I like. Because I want it to be comprehensive, I’ve been working (on and off) since about 2012 on a project where I watch the video of every single track that was ever a UK chart hit in the ’80s… in band alphabetical order. It’s a long project (it took me about two years just to compile the complete list) and I’ve only made it to the letter ‘J’ so far in terms of watching the videos and adding the best ones to my Spotify playlist.
As such, I sometimes get a bit of a craving for hits by bands who are further along in the alphabet, and have a separate ‘holding’ playlist for this purpose! Pet Shop Boys are one of these bands and also one of my favourite acts of the era. I bought tickets for myself and Geth to go and see them in concert in 2020; the gig was postponed first to 2021 and now to 2022, so I need to be patient for that one!
In recent months (since about November) their 1988 number one ‘Heart’ has been a frequent late-night craving for me. I LOVE that intro. Makes me want to dance! (I don’t, as Geth has usually gone to bed by that point and my loud trampling would probably wake him up. Chair-dancing is fair game though.)
The video is a daft story about a wedding and vampires. ’80s videos were the best.
More musical ramblings next week.
My first proper virtual for 2021 (other than the LEJOG accumulator I’m doing, which started on 1st January and lasts all year) was a 10k run that I did for the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation’s Retro Run Series. I’d seen these virtual runs advertised online last year, and as an ’80s obsessive I was really keen to do the ’80s version.
You can sign up to do a challenge for any decade from the ’60s to the ’00s, or even do all five if you’d like to go for the supermedal! You can also choose any standard distance from 5k upwards, and can change your mind about the distance if necessary before the virtual (as the medal and t-shirt aren’t distance-specific). I decided on 10k, as I really wanted to complete a 10k in January 2021, having not managed to do so in November or December 2020. As it happened, because of the snow, the only 10k I managed to do in January was on the treadmill, and I wanted to do a road 10k for the virtual. I eventually managed to get my ‘official’ 10k in on the first weekend of February – I was really glad that you could choose to do it any day before the end-of-February deadline! The website now states that you can do the runs at any time up to the end of May 2021, so still plenty of time to get those retro runs in if you’re interested.
I was really pleased with the run itself – my running had all been very slow over the winter, but on the day my legs clearly decided it was a race and so I managed a time that was fairly close to my official 10k race PB. One of a number of recent signs that are very promising for when I get back to doing real races again.
I didn’t listen to the ’80s playlist provided during the run, as I generally prefer to run without headphones. I will have a listen at home at some point though! Bling-wise I donated extra in order to get the t-shirt – I don’t normally bother with a t-shirt for virtuals as I have so many from real races and my drawer is getting a bit full, but the Retro Run Series ’80s t-shirt is a fantastic design, with a reference to the infamous Frankie/Hamnett knockoff slogan on the front, and a nice synthwave-esque neon/car/sunset motif on the back.
The medal is also great, with the featured ’80s item being a ‘Sonny’ Walkman (avoiding a legal issue maybe?) and some nice ’80s colours and fonts that are a very welcome addition to my medal collection. Going to display this one with pride.
The Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation are going to be doing another virtual series later this year, so I’ll be waiting with interest to see what they come up with!
While I was very little in the ’80s and so didn’t pick my own outfits, the clothes I wore back then look unquestionably vintage from a modern perspective (see for example the unfortunate-looking snow suit from a couple of weeks ago). Children’s fashion changes just as adult fashion does, and so I rocked ’80s jumpers back in the day just as much as the grown-ups did. Even if mine were usually hand-knitted with cartoon characters on the front!
In this photo from September 1987 (apparently an interesting month for me, as well as the name of one of my favourite synthwave bands in the modern day), my outfit is beautifully of its time, as is the bin in the background of the photo (I don’t even remember the last time I saw a round metal bin like that in real life!). Animals, however, are timeless, and so these two cats in the photo – both the one I’m trying to befriend and the one by the bin in the background – look exactly as cats do today, even though they’re both almost certainly long gone from this world. (It is possible for cats to live to about my age, but very unusual!)
I adore cats. Looks like I always have!
When I organised my 2021 wall planner the other week, I took up Geth’s suggestion of using sticky notes for scheduled events so that they could be easily moved around if postponed for COVID-19 reasons.
I have apparently not used sticky notes for a very long time. This is the back of my sticky note pad:
The pad dates from a time when 0582 numbers were in use for the Luton area – it’s been 01582 since 1995, so the notepad is early ’90s at the latest, though I suspect it’s probably more like late ’80s judging by the font and style used. It was presumably a bottom-of-the-drawer find when I was a kid!
More vintage stylings next week.
A bit of a historical picture / crossover with Saturday ’80s Photo for today’s phone box! While I’m still hunting for the next phone box example in Doctor Who, I remembered I was going to share this one from the family archives. It’s a phone box that features in the background of a snap from our trip to Cornwall in September 1987.
It was September 1987, and on this particular day of our Cornish holiday we were visiting the town of Padstow. I don’t have the exact date as photos in our family archive are only labelled by month, but I could probably track it down in the future as Mum has always tended to log things like that in her diaries. EDIT: Mum tells me it was the 10th. Thanks Mum!
The full vista of the photo:
I clearly wasn’t as interested in the phone box as I would be nowadays! The next photo on the roll features a milk van, which is probably even more of a rarity than a red phone box here in 2021, although there’s an interesting article here about their possible resurgence due to the pandemic.
To my surprise and delight, both the pub and the phone box are still in situ!
(Coordinates 50°54’10.7″N, 4°93’73.2″W.)
The phone box even still has a phone in it as of the most recent Street View image taken in 2018. It looks very well-kept and is maybe maintained by the pub owners as well as the council.
Still hoping to get back to the Who phone boxes next week!
A slight bit of blog business today. Now that I’m caught up with all my pre-pandemic gig reviews, I’m planning to make Wednesday ‘music day’ on the blog. I’ve not focused on music posts for a while, as I’ve not been focusing on music so much in my everyday life, for a couple of reasons. First of all, gigs are obviously on the back burner for now. Secondly, I’ve not been listening to music in a focused way during the last year – I’ve been finding I concentrate on work better when it’s quiet, and when I’m out for a walk with headphones I prefer to listen to podcasts. When I do put music on (largely at the request of Geth when he wants some background music), it’s always an old standby like ’80s pop or synthwave or videogame soundtracks – it’s been a long time since I’ve deliberately listened to an album or sought out new music.
It’s been about eighteen months since I wrote my last New Hits Friday post, because I’ve not been keeping up with the chart for the last year (most chart music is not to my taste so I was starting to find it a bit of a chore, though I will go back and catch up because I still find the chart really interesting academically). I’m a few Now! albums behind, and other than the usual Christmas shows, I can’t remember the last time I turned on the music channels. It’s just not been a focus for the last year and a bit; there have been other things going on.
However, I would like to get back into the habit of focused music listening, which is why I’m going to be setting aside Wednesday blog posts for related content. This could take many forms – reviews, features, general ramblings – as I want to keep the scope quite broad. I expect that at first, I’ll mostly be focusing on music topics I already know about, but there’s always the potential to learn something new. Sometimes on ukulele!
