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.
Chasing the Dragon
It didn’t happen like this. I know it didn’t. Yet this is how I always remember it.
The year is 1989: it’s my first academic term at St.George’s Foundation School in Broadstairs, and despite having desperately waited all morning for the tannoy to announce lunch break, I am nevertheless standing in the playground, transfixed by the sight of a boy in the year above me playfully tossing a dwarf.
That’s not how it sounds, by the way. Written from the distant, lofty hindsight of 2022, you might be forgiven for thinking that I’m about to intimate that dwarf-tossing was some sort of sport in English high schools during the 80s, but the dwarf in question was a plastic miniature from a now oft-forgotten game called Heroquest.
I was cold and hungry and quite determined to follow several of the girls I fancied into the lunch canteen, where a snaking line of hungry pre-teens had already meandered around the corner and past the caretaker’s office....and yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to move.