poppy seed rollsbrie and apple baguettes
mood rings
pet rocks
oxtail soup
echinacea
playboys
potted shrimps
canned frozen orange juice
Babycham
Surprise dried peas
Mivvi iced lollies
Victoria sandwich cake
Afro hairdoshuge tins of assorted cocktail biscuits
saying “but of course we will never want to read books/newspapers/magazines on screen – it would be too tiring”
not being able to buy milk in shops (It was delivered in glass bottles by a milkman, or you bought in in cartons from a milk machine.)
blue fizzy lemonade (80s)
advice to serve cereal with fruit (and photographs of same labeled “serving suggestion”). As far as I know, nobody ever did.
tea ladies who came round your office with a trolley at 11am and 3pm, dispensing milky coffee and tea (it was all you got)
trellis wallpaper
picture windows (please bring them back)
people who thought Facebook and Twitter were evil
the kind of music that sounded better when you were stoned
hot desking (and doing without email because reading emails takes too long. Remember memos? And how do you arrange a meeting without email?)
files that were just a spike on a piece of wood
people talking on two telephones
terrible silent movie compilations (“when cahmedy was king!”)
hysteria - apparently now just as common as in Freud’s day
Leslie Halliwell’s Film Guides (imdb - and TV stopped showing old films)
Rosa Luxemburg “She was everywhere in the 80s.” Matthew Sweet
worrying about the sound from Sony Walkman headphones, institution of silent (Walkmanless) carriages on trains
More here, and links to the rest.
oh fret not ... many of these things still exist ... Baxter's oxtail soup can be bought at Waitrose, echinacea at Holland & Barrett, a Victoria sponge at most bakeries, and as for hotdesking, I work at a dept of Cambridge University where hotdesking is available for people dropping in from other offices ... must admit I cannot find concentrated frozen orange juice which is tiresome as it is often mentioned in North American recipes ... ever onward!
ReplyDeleteBut you wouldn't be offered oxtail soup in a restaurant, and the echinacea fad has died down, and companies don't adopt obligatory hotdesking for all as a wizard new policy...
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