Growing up in the Eighties

Yesterday, Boris Johnson gave, by all accounts, (I haven’t watched because I’m virus distancing myself) a bumbling press conference that said we are not allowed to have fun. Being happy is the root cause of this virus. He heard that in countries where people are miserable no one has died from the Coronavirus, which we are now calling COVID-19 to make it sound much more serious. 

The country responded quickly. University students were banned from going to lectures, old ladies can’t go to Tai Chi anymore, schools stopped after school clubs, the Scouts cancelled all plans to stand on top of mountains and breathe in fresh clean air for the foreseeable future. How long fun is banned for seems to be unclear but some reports are going for 18-24 months. 

I grew up in the seventies and eighties and am in a good place to endure this. We know how to not have fun. This moment is what we’ve been trained for.

We grew up in times of fear. Doom and gloom were our middle names. The power randomly stopped working and we had to huddle with our family in one of those blankets with tiny square holes in it that everyone said kept you warm but didn’t. Those of us who got through it played cards and scrabble by candlelight and those that didn’t came to school with a black eye and random bruises that no one mentioned and learned to wedge a chair under the door handle for next time. I was one of the lucky ones and have grown up to be quite the card shark. 

During the day we went to school, where teachers were still allowed to whack you if you tried to have fun and when we got home it would often be to an empty house, as our mothers had just realised that working and having financial independence was preferable to being owned by a man. Even if our parents were at home they didn’t entertain us. We were left to our own devices and so wandered railway tracks, built dens in woods stuffed with flashers, or counted the traffic.

We ate food from tins and packets and were enthusiastic to do so because it was quite a new thing. My neighbour was a rep for a canned food processor and used to give my mum unlabelled tins, which she would use to make a pie. Not knowing if it would be stewing steak, cherry or something that looked and smelt like cat food was the most exciting eating we did. 

Our school milk was taken away because drinking congealed milk from those tiny bottles, especially if the blue tits had pecked a hole in the top and siphoned off all the cream, was the most fun we had. 

We had a giant squirrel come into school to frighten us about crossing the road. Sometimes the squirrel would veer off track and tell us we were all going to die if we didn’t sneeze into our handkerchief and wash our hands. We learnt a catchy little song, “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases, catch them in your handkerchief.” I think I’ve still got my Tufty Club handkerchief somewhere.

By 1985 we were teenagers and we were certain that we were going to die. We all read dystopian fiction and knew the Russians were going to kill us. Sting wrote pop songs in minor keys with a ticking clock accompaniment. Some people built bunkers and even children’s picture books were about nuclear war. 

We watched Zombie films and knew this day was coming. The Long Suffering Husband has been waiting for the Zombie Apocalypse his whole life. Wherever we go, he looks for the best place to hole up. So far, the library at Harvard is the best he’s seen.

We’ve got this. People my age, who just happen to be running the world, find that not having fun reminds us of our youth. It’s what we trained for. Who’s going to join me for a verse of Corona Eileen?