The Gallery:The Eighties

Posted by Jacq in Blog, Me Time | 9 comments

The 80′s weren’t just a decade to me. I was born in 1970, so they were my double digit decade.

I went from being a 10 year old child, to a 20 year old living independently at university. I think of the 80′s as a bit of a cocoon for me, I changed so much during that time.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately!), I have very few photos of me during that time of my life. My Grandmother was a bit of a shutterbug and took loads of photos but these remain at home, on the other side of the world.

All I have is a photo album my sister made me in 1995, shortly after our father died, in which she has cut a number of old photos up and pasted them onto the album cover in a sort of collage . She’s covered the whole thing with plastic bookseal. This makes them just about impossible to get a decent photo of  anything and of course the original photos are now ruined.

Still, they are all I have.

Here I am on the beach as an already chubby 11-12 year old. I was at the ‘don’t look at the camera’ stage and my mother still cut my hair.

I was 14 when I got a chance to go to a residential camp for a week.  There were horses there and I much preferred animals to people. My mother was obsessed with me perming my hair, an obsession that I tolerated much too long, and you can see she’s had her way here. Bleurgh.

This blurry shot shows me with my perm growing out and my horrible, heavy-framed plastic glasses. We didn’t have free specs for kids in NZ so my mother actually paid good money for these! Oh, and check out the pastel motifed T shirt. Nice.

I was 16 in this shot and off to a school ball. Remember those? Great posed shot and a fantastic mullet with a wonderful example of a loose perm!

And here I am with my very first dog of my own. I think this one may be early ’90s, rather than late ’80s but I just needed to show you that the perm grew out, eventually!

Having so few photos of me growing up has made me determined to make sure that my children have every moment of their lives chronicled as fully as possible. I’m not sure they will appreciate this for many years, but at some point they will thankful, I’m sure.

For a blast from the past, check out this week’s Gallery, over at Sticky Fingers.