Knightmare, Labyrinth & Fighting Fantasy: A Retrospective on 80s Nostalgia
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Knightmare, Labyrinth & Fighting Fantasy: A Retrospective on 80s Nostalgia

If you look back through your life, you'll quickly realise that certain selected memories have a power that seems to go beyond mere nostalgia. So many of those memories will involve things that have had a huge influence on who you are and the way in which you view the world. When I look back on my own childhood, it's very obvious to me that I felt different from other kids my age: not necessarily worse than everyone else and certainly not better, but in a very real sense...apart.

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Socking It To ‘Em
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Socking It To ‘Em

It's a Wednesday morning, and I'm running the shift at Blockbuster Video: I'm one of the three assistant managers, and Wednesdays are pretty quiet, so it's just two other guys and me: one is working down at the front of the store while I'm cleaning at the back. The store in Ramsgate is pretty big, so he'd have to shout to be heard. It turns out that on this occasion he does shout, but I don't hear him, so he scares the living hell out of me when I turn around, and he's suddenly just STANDING there in a mad panic.

'Dave, you've got to come to the counter. Quickly.' 'What? Why?'

'Some woman just barrelled in...and she's REALLY pissed off .'

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The Money Pit
Blog David Stone Blog David Stone

The Money Pit

It took my nan roughly five decades to wreck our three-floor, semi-detached house in Ramsgate. She managed this by employing a series of people she met down the pub to do jobs they weren’t exactly qualified to take on.

She employed a window-cleaner to completely redecorate the house, a task that resulted in him covering all the internal walls with wood panelling in a chaotic mess that honestly looked like the work of a deranged cultist attempting to build some sort of shrine to a dark god. The rooms on the third storey were the worst, as he clearly ran out of wood and ended up hammering random squares and misshapen cut-outs to cover empty gaps. It was like living on the inside of a jigsaw puzzle. I was once interviewed by The Times newspaper for an article called ‘The Geek Gets Even’ where the reporter described the house as a dwelling with ‘creepy wood veneer walls.’ He wasn’t wrong.

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