What decade did you grow up in?

Below is an article I recently wrote for Helium.com. What decade did you grow up in? Do you get nostalgic when you hear certain tunes on the radio? Does a certain smell trigger a childhood memory?

I'd love to hear your own experiences........

Singing the theme to Rainbow Brite whilst cycling down the road on my BMX bike, side ponytail swinging in the breeze, and knowing that when I got home I’d be having something cool to eat for dinner, courtesy of the new, brown, room-sized microwave my Father had just spent a months wages on.

The Eighties even now conjure up images of large shoulder pads, big hair, wacky TV shows and the best music I’ve ever heard. Sound familiar, well of course it does. The eighties were so damn popular that we are now seeing all of these things again, big hair is back with a vengeance and shoulder pads have been making regular appearances on the catwalk. My little sister who is 15 years my junior has hair Joan Collins would have been proud of, but something’s different. Where’s the carefree air of the eighties gone?

If like me, you share a deep love of all things eighties, then you’ll understand that unless you were there you’ll never experience anything like it again. It’s all about nostalgia.

Did you dance to wham and eat pop-tarts? I sure did and my little sister does the same now. The difference is though, that now we’re all pretty aware of the fact that none of us are ever going to marry George Michael (No matter how pretty we are) and we’re also painfully aware that the pop-tarts you buy now have none of those lovely additives they did in the eighties.

We used to play ‘computer games’ on our spectrum computer and later on a commodore 64, both of which were loaded on a cassette tape and took at least half and hour to get going. The high pitched loading sound that came from the tape deck still echoes in my brain all these years later. How things have changed. Nintendo wii, playstation, nintendo ds & xBoxes would have all have seemed like space-age nonsense.

Mobile phones were something we did aspire to though. If you had a mobile phone, then you were ‘someone’. You had money and the size of your phone told everybody exactly that. You carried it around in it’s own bag, that now a modern day laptop would fit in. I can only imagine the muscles that were built lifting those huge monstrosities to your ear.

Growing up in the eighties for me was a fun time with friends. Playing out on the street until after the sun went down, with no worries. Front doors open and virtually no traffic on the roads. Long hot summers, ice-pops with so many e numbers that you had a permanently discoloured tongue. Madonna at her best and no sign of Simon Cowell on the box. Grandparents who we thought would be around forever and people in their 30’s who seemed positively ancient.

Was it the eighties though, or was it just growing up?