To Want To Go Back To 1983?

[GondolaQueen]

Just seen some video clips from the time that made me nostalgic.

Surely it’s not so far away that we can’t just reach out and grab it ?

It was constant - but in a different way to now, at least in my experience. There was much more focus on possibility and what could happen. Protests and demonstrations to 'ban the bomb'.

Now the constant is having the ability to, at any given moment, see the reality of war in high definition imagery. We have access to news 24/7, and the news gets to us much faster and in more more detail, should we choose to access it. And that's not taking into account the video games that people, including children, play. Jet set willy and frogger it's not!

I’m a 78 baby so was 5 in 1983 and I don’t remember much of it to be honest. Vague memories of being in infant school and being a sheep in the nativity is all that’s jumping out!

I absolutely love 80’s music it’s the best in my opinion and I have passed this on to my dc’s. I also didn’t have any chronic pain in 1983 or a worry in the world 😊

My high school uniform was brown and yellow 🤣 I have hated brown with a passion ever since.

Totally agree with this. No young person was being seen dead in brown in the 80s. There was a cream/beige/floral moment, and an electric blue one, but mostly it was shades of denim (including the launch of stonewash), lots of bright colours and lots of black.

I was 3 in 1983. My best year was 1996. I was 16, started college, lost weight, found a huge group of friends and became so confident.
I'd love to go back and to be with my parents when they were so much younger and still in good health.
I miss those days.

I was a baby but it just seems bleak to me - warnings of nuclear war, fussy tvs, no avacados, parents hitting and yelling, stray dogs, even more sexism, hiv epidemic, rife alcoholism, mass unemployment, no online supermarket deliveries!

I mean I'm not saying things are perfect now but I don't see the 80s as the answer. Maybe early 00s if we must.

Early eighties was a tough time for many adults. Record unemployment with very high levels of youth unemployment.

We just have different memories of it then. That's not saying I didn't have fun too.

I wouldn’t want to live a day in my life as a child again and I had a happy childhood.
But oh to go back to 2009 when I was a SAHM to my 3 year old son and newborn baby daughter. Those were the days of my life.

I was 23. My 83 was wonderful and exciting. I'd moved to London, bought a flat, was a Sloaney girl from a home county and had a job in the City. They were the last days when you didn't quite need a degree and we could still add up fast in our heads. There was ball after ball and between them parties. And so many nights and lunches in pubs that no longer exist like the Cross Keys in Chelsea.

I loved the clothes, lived in Laura Ashley at weekends, Benetton was bright and George Davies was imagining an early Next. Everyone had something from the Habitat bright spotty range, be it a mug or a tray. Lots of people were using Sony Walkmans on the tube but they were the equivalent of about a week's wages for many people. I preferred 70s music.

We had the Falklands and the miners strike and the wall was still up in Berlin. Interest rates were high and there was the denationalisation of industries that just weren't working for the people from a customer service perspective. I had to wait 12 weeks to have a phone connected! In London there was a skills shortage and I don't ever remember having friends who were out of work. I often wonder if Brits would be more forgiving of brave brave people escaping here from dreadful lives if they were prepared to shift themselves from the North East or a Welsh pit village for a better life.

The news came on at 10pm and we read a broadsheet in the morning and an evening paper on the way home.from work. Nothing was instant and the shops were shut on Sundays.

For me it was a time of hope and discovery and 1984 just got better. But I think I can say that for every year since except the ones with bereavements.

@RosesAndHellebores you were living in a completely different world to me although I was aware of that world from TV.

Yes, I wasn’t quite born then, but I trust you all and would go back to then anyway!

I feel so sorry for young people today. They don’t seem to be having nearly as much fun as we did when I was 16-26, even as ‘recently’ as the noughties.

My grandchildren appear to be having fun. More fun than I had at their age in the 70s in fact.

I was eighteen in 83 and was at art college. It was brilliant - full grant, housing benefit and you could sign on over the holidays if you wanted to.

But sadly my whole memory of that time and the late seventies was blighted with never feeling safe. Men would follow you home, yell at you out of car window when you were in school uniform and comment on your body and your looks. You could be wearing full dungarees and DMs and they still would try it on, in a pub they would feel you up if it was busy, and you would be called names if you didn't sleep with them.

I was probably unlucky, but I still feel a bit traumatised when I look back on those times.

Oh yes, I'm coming too...

So true

Oh yes please. Nice and comfy in my mum's womb and listening to awesome music. No responsibilities, nothing to do but swim around in the amniotic fluid and maybe have a bit of a dance/headbang on occasion. It's all been downhill since then 😔

Whilst with my nostalgia glasses on it seems great...especially for teenagers you could be a mod, a ted, a skin, a punk, in to pop, new wave, disco, reggie, two tone, ... And most of the time you were left alone. You didn't have to follow fashions that cost hundreds.

You could be anything...except gay or black or indian...3 million on the dole with no hope of a job, major industrial manufacturing finished in the uk. The threat of the bomb from the ussr or a bomb from the ira. Crap, unsafe cars on the road, drink driving rife, corrupt police and politicians. I

Passive smoking, sexism and racism allowed unchecked in most work places. Union closed shop so if you didn't toe the line you were out. Strikes over nothing losing jobs as if the unions didn't actually care by that stage.

For a young man going to football, into town on a Saturday night or even the local pub was dangerous. Sorry but it's better now

No miners in your family OP? OK the strike didn't start until 1984 but the plans to close the mines were well known.

Recession, inflation at 10% imported goods cheaper than home made.

50% of children leaving school without qualifications.

I'm actually having a real problem with yearning for this at the moment.

I looked up my Grandparent's house on zoopla from a previous sale and am slightly obsessed with looking and remembering. Sitting next to my Grandpa filling in the results at final score for the pools, watching open all hours, watching Wimbledon when Boris win, playing card games, eating Angel cakes and drinking hot Ribena. Playing cards constantly.

Looks totally different, and bare, of course. Their (massive) telly is where my Grandpa's chair was.

I just think, how is it possible that they sit there night after night, unaware of the ghosts of what was? I mean they're looking right through him.

It's my sensitive spot in life. I think being 50 and having a sense of time passing in general is maybe adding to it. But god, I too, I think might give a year of my life to go back and tell them all how lovely they are. And that makes me feel terrible because my girls are here now, in the present, but the past is always pulling me in.

Should point out Boris didn't win Wimbledon in 83 - so maybe I'd take any Streatham of the 80s, 81-87 I reckon are the years I most strongly yearn for. TOTP/Grange Hill, and earlier Kick Start, the Adventure Game and We Are The Champions, and Knockout. Tv was brilliant, prob because there was less choice and we all watched the same stuff.

Love the 80s decor, so much colour! Think this was more for younger ones though as it was pretty dull and beige in my own house (excepting the avocado bathroom)

https://www.reddit.com/r/80sdesign/comments/10zwm4r/aselectionnofvisualssfrom1980ss_habitat/?rdt=49407

Go back to 1983? Yup. I'd be a 23 yr old graduate.

I love 80s films - Rita, Sue and Bob Too (this shows the differences between the poor and well off really well with the houses)

This is England shows things as quite gritty too and shows the racism

Threads from 1984 scared everyone about nuclear war - it's actually being shown tonight on bbc4

I love watching 80s brookside on STV player. Everyone looks so old for their age and it's like a real insight into what it was like in the 80s (the red wire rack from habitat from my link above is also in one of the houses!)