WHEN I asked Patrick, who is home from university for the summer, if he wanted some of his dad’s old clothes, I wasn’t expecting him to be too enthusiastic. But he was positively excited.
There were some recently bought jeans and smart shirts in the pile, which looked really good: “They just don’t fit him,” I said.
But Patrick’s face fell: “When you said old clothes, I thought you meant his old clothes, not last year’s. I’m interested in the clothes he wore 30 years ago.”
I thought I’d misheard him. Because 30 years ago was the Eighties. And I was there. I lived through the decade that style forgot, the one that should be slapped with a ‘Do not resuscitate’ order.
Leggings. Voluminous hair. Fingerless lace gloves. Huge plastic earrings. Bright colours. Padded shoulders. Animal prints. Headbands. Leg warmers. Ra-ra skirts. Jumpsuits. Ripped jeans. Over-sized off the shoulder tops.
And that was just the girls, mainly. The boys didn’t fare much better in their geometric patterned shirts and Miami Vice-style suits with rolled up sleeves, worn with pastel shirts and thin ties.
As students at the time, we were rummaging through our parents’ wardrobes in search of their old clothes from the Fifties and Sixties, which probably puzzled them back then just as much as Patrick’s interest in the Eighties, a decade renowned for its diabolical dress sense, puzzles me now.
But while we may, at least, have had the sense to don some classic vintage pieces, I can’t pretend we didn’t adopt many of the bright synthetic and, frankly, weird clothes that the fashion world was thrusting upon us at the time. We were young and impressionable. We didn’t know any better.
I can’t imagine Patrick ever wearing any of it now. “Take it from me. You really don’t want to go back there,” I advised him.
I wondered if he might be winding me up. But then I did overhear a teenage girl talking in a shop queue with her friend about the previous night’s episode of The Goldbergs, an American TV sitcom set in the Eighties.
“I wish I had grown up in the Eighties. It was so cool,” she said. And she seemed perfectly normal.
I’ve also started to notice Patrick and his 17-year-old brother Roscoe playing music from the decade. I’m recognising tracks like Ladies Night by Kool and the Gang, The Knack’s My Sharona, M’s Pop Muzik and Earth, Wind & Fire’s Let’s Groove being played in the house.
“How did you come across this?  Are you serious?” I asked incredulously. But they tell me that ‘happy, boppy, disco’ Eighties music is now ‘really cool’.
The boys even wanted to watch an American high school movie on TV the other night, because it was set in the Eighties: “I love looking at what they used to wear, the styles are amazing,” said Roscoe.
And they all love the recently released, and critically acclaimed, film Everybody Wants Some!!, about a group of unruly disco-dancing college students in the Eighties, directed by Richard Linklater, who also made Dazed and Confused, School of Rock and Boyhood and is one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite directors.
With a soundtrack including I Want You to Want Me by Cheap Trick, Shake Your Groove Thing by Peaches & Herb, Let’s Get Serious by Jermaine Jackson and Bad Girls by Donna Summer, there is no getting away from it.
The Eighties is definitely a thing.
ALBERT returned from his school trip to France with a rucksack that stank of mouldy old cheese. This is probably because it did contain mouldy old cheese. Given that he had a mammoth 17-hour coach and ferry journey, I had lovingly prepared four sandwiches, with an assortment of fillings, for him. But, since he and his mates brought lots of sweets to share, he only ate one. The rest were left to rot in his bag. “It’s your fault, it’s those sandwiches you made me,” he complained when he put the bag in the car and we had to open all the windows. Stupidly, I had also packed him a change of underpants and socks for each day. Most remained unworn. Having sent his four older brothers off on the same school trip over the years, I really should have known better.