What were you doing in 1996?

[NW3Lady]

I went from my 3rd to my 4th year of secondary school. We started having ‘Careers’ lessons which felt quite serious and scary. Which GCSE options to take was a major focus and topic of conversation, which seems so silly and inconsequential now. I’m not sure I can even remember what I plumped for in the end.

The Spice Girls were bloomin’ everywhere, there was no escaping them. Friends and ER were the shows to watch. We got internet for the first time - dial-up which took ages to connect and then hogged the phone line so that there were constant battles over it.

How about you?

Dropped out of college (aged 20, second crack at it)...got a job, bought a flat, met my now XH and got engaged.

I was starting secondary school at 11 years old. Me and my mates used to dress up as the Spice Girls and do performances in school assembly, I was always Baby Spice! Cringey, obviously 😂 but very fond memories 😃

Digging?!

Yes. Excavations in technical parlance

Ah! Sorry, thought you meant for gold maybe.

I've never found gold, though am always asked if I have

I was in the 7th grade and just beginning to explore music and getting into Green Day, Beastie boys, NoFx etc. Didn't have a school uniform as they weren't standard unless you went to a Catholic high-school. So was wearing baggy cargos, band t-shirts and/or cropped tanks and Airwalks. Tony Hawk was my ideal husband and Courtney Love was a goddess. Experimented with my first make up looks (I was 13) it was all about the black eyeliner over and under eyes and skin toned matte lips.

Just realising how Liberal and tolerant my parents were!

My driving test !

I was in my second year at Sussex University and working in a gift shop in the city centre. My boyfriend of one year (now DH) was moving in with me and a friend (and I remember being quite stressed about it as my previous boyfriend lived in another city and I hadn’t lived with anyone for five years).

I was reminiscing about my uni years with a colleague at the weekend - 1995 to 1997. It was the years of Britpop, Loaded magazine and lad culture and I remember it was fashionable for young guys on the campus to carry around rolled up copies of The Sun newspaper!

I was 11, in my last year at primary school and my dad died in the February - that was a weird year; mum took us to Spain on holiday (our first ever abroad), some kid threw a breeze block at my head (he was aiming for someone else...) which needed to be glued and I started high school in the September - ah the memories!

My brother used to read FHM. Whatever happened to that?

Living in a cute cottage in a cute village in Surrey, newly cohabiting with (now) DH, working hard and socialising lots, slightly hating my boss and debating looking for a new job (which I did by the end of the year), starting to plan my big 30th birthday bash.

Happy days!

I was a kid living on a remote almost abandoned island getting up to mischief with my brother. We had the run of the whole island and would go to the beach everyday where we would be the only people there, ride our bikes as fast as we could on the empty roads, collect crickets and play with the carnivorous plants sticking grass in them so they would close their 'mouths'. It was an idyllic very outdoorsy childhood in lots of ways if you didn't mind complete social isolation.

Ugh. Bad year for me. I’d dropped out of uni and was working in an awful sales place with a load of letchy older men. Most of my friends were away at uni so ‘got in with a bad crowd’ , as my mother would say, and spent way too much time and money drinking in pubs and taking drugs in sleazy clubs. Only good memory of that year was a fortnights holiday in Ibiza with an old school friend.

Werid year. Finished school, moved counties with my parents leaving all my friends, parents separated, moved house again leaving theb handful of new people id met, started university, came home to a third "family home" for the end of the year.
That God for picking a university course i really loved as it gave me stability in a year of chaos.

My dd was about to turn 1 years old! First child. Just moving house to where we still live. Didn't think we'd still be living here.

I loved having a small child!

You should turn it into a book!

I was 15 and heading on holiday to Spain with my parents and brother via coach (from Glasgow, it took days, it was awful)

I had taped all my favourite music onto a few tapes and played underwear (tho b side to common people) about a million times. At that point, I had never been semi naked in somebody else’s room

I passed my driving test in July 1996! So driving around in my old Austin Metro and working in the holidays in a shop. It felt like a nice happy time.

I was 19 and pregnant. Tough at the time but no regrets.

Burying my last remaining blood relative. In more recent years I have had my own dc, and also discovered and made contact with some distant relatives I didn't know I had. But 1996 was quite a difficult year for me.

Finishing high school with academic honors. The boy I was on and off seeing became my official boyfriend, I was so happy!.Got my license and my parents bought me an old car. 1996 was a good year.

Moving to London. What a time to be alive.

Travelling around the world, meeting people & partying hard, happy times