What were the 80s? . . . Bueller? . . . Anyone? Well, you are truly a child of the 80s if any of the following statements are true for you:
You know what leg warmers are; You know who Mr. T is; You remember when Atari was a state of the art video game system; You used to be able to breakdance (or wished you could); The phrases "bright light" and "phone home" actually mean something to you; You had a BMX bike. . .
The 80s was a decade where young folk wore fluorescent, neon clothing and business folk wore double-breasted suits with shoulder pads and believed "Greed Is Good" . . . and when Prince sang about partying "like it's 1999" it seemed so far away!
Dallas and Dynasty ruled the airwaves, Transformers were more than meets the eye, leggings under a short skirt was considered a stylish look, Michael Jackson was still black and 'by the power of Greyskull you HAD the power!'
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher promoted a 'return to Victorian values' in Britain, which was matched by a new conservatism in the USA under Ronald Reagan, who was voted in as president and served the maximum eight-year term in office.
AIDS was introduced to the public as a sexually transmitted disease of potentially plague proportions that would put paid to the trendy permissiveness of the Sixties and Seventies.
Meanwhile at home and in the playground, people were struggling to master Rubik's Cube - the biggest craze of the early part of the decade, a block of movable coloured squares named after its Hungarian inventor, Erno Rubik.
Video games were the hottest new innovation as video arcade game machines began to replace pinball machines in amusement arcades across the Western world with Pac Man and Space Invaders leading the pack.
Sophisticated equipment for leisure and pleasure became increasingly affordable as incredible advances in technology continued, and the Eighties soon also became the decade of gadgets - From digital watches to cappuccino machines to cellular phones to computers (Even though a Commodore 64 was the pinnacle of computing excellence).
In 1984, Yuppies appeared on the scene. An acronym for Young Urban professionals, it became synonymous with upward mobility, greed, and selfishness. But then the 80s was the decade of Self; self-improvement, self motivation, self-help manuals . . .
"There's no such thing as society. The individual is all", Margaret Thatcher said. And appropriately enough, Sony launched the personal pocket stereo cassette player - The Walkman.
The Yuppies wore designer clothes, drove hi-tech cars, had high-speed jobs and went nowhere without the one essential item - the Filofax , a portable information system, (we used to call them diaries and address books) held together in a leather bound ring binder.
1987 introduced two new words to the English language - glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction) as the West fell in love with Mikhail Gorbachev - The first cuddly, user-friendly Soviet leader, who talked of the East and West becoming good neighbours . . . which we finally did as the decade ended with Europe's biggest ever street party as the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and East met West for the first time since 1961.
Then of course there were Gremlins, ET, Dukes of Hazzard, Knight Rider, Alf, Strawberry Shortcake, The A-Team, Care bears, Fraggle Rock, Cabbage Patch Kids, Australia winning the Americas Cup . . . was that all really two decades ago?!
