BACK TO THE EIGHTIES....
On the weekend my lovely sister-in-law Jo had a 40th birthday party.
We went back to the eighties...dressed appropriately..and to make it more fun (will use that word wisely) it was held in a roller skating rink.
Yep, eighties music, eighties clothes and roller skates.
Do you know how long it has been since I've been on roller skates? Long, long time...
But I did it. I won't say I was poetry in motion----that I glided and swerved....that it all came back to me. Not a chance. The first few, okay about five laps, I held on to the rails and putt putted my way around. By the end of our session I could...slowly....make my way around the rink without needing the rails or wall to clutch on to.
I have bruises...loss of dignity (which I really don't seem to have much of any more- that's what working with children will do to you)...but it was great fun.
The eighties were an interesting time- for me personally it was a decade of great change. I got married, moved to our first home, lost my mother to cancer, and had my two children....great changes indeed.
But it was also a time of MC Hammer pants and jelly shoes...leg warmers and shoulder pads. Rubik's Cube and Pacman.
The eighties were also the decade of AIDS, fall of the Berlin Wall, the assassination of John Lennon. It was Tiananmen Square and Chernobyl, the Space shuttle Challenger explosion...and Cabbage Patch kids.
It was Milli Vanilli and Wham, Roxette and New Kids on the Block. And girls just wanting to have fun...
It was Good Morning Vietnam and Dead Poet's Society....The Breakfast Club and Caddy Shack....The Shining (red rum red rum)....Indiana Jones and E.T....Blues Brothers and Ghostbusters......the Princess Bride and Terminator.
Some amazing movies...modern classics in that list. As for the world of writing...what was making it big in the eighties?
Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale....Roald Dahl's Matilda, The Witches and The BFG.
Alice Walker's The Colour Purple - still one of my all time favourite novels.
Terri Pratchett began his Discworld series with The Colour of Magic and continued on.
Amy Tan and The Joy Luck Club.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera....Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez....The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco....The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
Salman Rushdie and his Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses.
Stephen King's IT and Patrick Suskind's Pefume: The Story of a Murderer.
What an impressive list of works that have endured and became books still read, still borrowed from libraries, still bought.
The eighties were not simply a bubblegum era that should be banished and forgotten.
For some of us, it holds some great memories.
Vicki
http://vickithornton.weebly.com/
We went back to the eighties...dressed appropriately..and to make it more fun (will use that word wisely) it was held in a roller skating rink.
Yep, eighties music, eighties clothes and roller skates.
Do you know how long it has been since I've been on roller skates? Long, long time...
But I did it. I won't say I was poetry in motion----that I glided and swerved....that it all came back to me. Not a chance. The first few, okay about five laps, I held on to the rails and putt putted my way around. By the end of our session I could...slowly....make my way around the rink without needing the rails or wall to clutch on to.
I have bruises...loss of dignity (which I really don't seem to have much of any more- that's what working with children will do to you)...but it was great fun.
The eighties were an interesting time- for me personally it was a decade of great change. I got married, moved to our first home, lost my mother to cancer, and had my two children....great changes indeed.
But it was also a time of MC Hammer pants and jelly shoes...leg warmers and shoulder pads. Rubik's Cube and Pacman.
The eighties were also the decade of AIDS, fall of the Berlin Wall, the assassination of John Lennon. It was Tiananmen Square and Chernobyl, the Space shuttle Challenger explosion...and Cabbage Patch kids.
It was Milli Vanilli and Wham, Roxette and New Kids on the Block. And girls just wanting to have fun...
It was Good Morning Vietnam and Dead Poet's Society....The Breakfast Club and Caddy Shack....The Shining (red rum red rum)....Indiana Jones and E.T....Blues Brothers and Ghostbusters......the Princess Bride and Terminator.
Some amazing movies...modern classics in that list. As for the world of writing...what was making it big in the eighties?
Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale....Roald Dahl's Matilda, The Witches and The BFG.
Alice Walker's The Colour Purple - still one of my all time favourite novels.
Terri Pratchett began his Discworld series with The Colour of Magic and continued on.
Amy Tan and The Joy Luck Club.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera....Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez....The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco....The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
Salman Rushdie and his Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses.
Stephen King's IT and Patrick Suskind's Pefume: The Story of a Murderer.
What an impressive list of works that have endured and became books still read, still borrowed from libraries, still bought.
The eighties were not simply a bubblegum era that should be banished and forgotten.
For some of us, it holds some great memories.
Vicki
http://vickithornton.weebly.com/
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