There's a very specific flavour of grief reserved for snacks. Not the loud, public sort, but the quiet kind that ambushes you in a corner shop four decades after the fact. Your hand drifts towards the confectionery shelf for something it remembers, something that left the building before your voice broke, and the hand comes back empty. The sweet has gone. It left quietly and nobody held a service. I grew up on a council estate in Farnham in the seventies and eighties, where pocket money … continue reading
1980s
Neon, synth-pop and shoulder pads. Keith A Pearson's posts on all things 1980s: the nostalgia that powers time-travel novels like The '86 Fix.
A Week of 1988 Telly (All Four Channels of It)
I left school in the summer of 1988 with a handful of GCSEs and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the TV listings, only one of which has earned me a penny since. Telly mattered in 1988 in a way it simply can't now, because Britain had precisely four channels and no means of pausing any of them. You watched a programme when it went out, or you waited for the repeat, sometime around 1994. So pour a coffee and let me walk you through the viewing week as it actually looked: the teatime soap … continue reading
The Commodore 64 and the £9 Million Laptop
Ten years ago, I decided to write a novel. It's a long story, but for the purposes of this post, all you need to know is that the novel is called The '86 Fix, and it's set in 1986. The central character is Craig Pelling. Somewhere in the plot, he travels back to 1986 to undo a decision he made as a teenager. A decision that sent him on a path to a deeply unhappy life as a middle-aged man. The device that transported him back to 1986? A Commodore 64 computer, no less. 1986 happens to be the … continue reading
Best Songs of 1986: The UK Chart’s Strangest Vintage Year
In 1986, the UK charts made no sense and nobody cared. Prince, Madonna, and the Pet Shop Boys shared the Top 10 with a German-speaking Austrian, a dead man's reissue, and a song performed by rubber puppets. A perfectly ordinary Tuesday afternoon might see you hearing all of them back-to-back on Radio 1, and the idea that this constituted any kind of problem simply hadn't occurred to anybody. If you tried to pitch that chart today, the meeting would be over before you'd opened your laptop. In … continue reading
The Best 1980s Time-Travel Novels (For Readers Who Miss the Mixtape Era)
If your heart still lives somewhere between a tape deck and Teletext, this list is for you. This isn't a vague roundup of time travel novels — this is specifically about books that drop you into the 1980s, or close enough to smell the hairspray. Walkmans, Top of the Pops, pre-internet Britain, and the quiet ache of wondering what you'd do differently if life handed you a do-over. I've split the list into three sections: modern British nostalgia (the bittersweet do-over novels), international … continue reading
Would You Change The Past if You Could?
Most of us have a private highlight reel of bad decisions and near-misses. We tell ourselves it built “character,” which is true in the same way a broken leg “builds resilience.” If a door appeared tomorrow and said, Pick a date, off you go, most people would at least hover by the handle. That’s the itch at the heart of A Page in Your Diary: not the sci-fi bells and whistles, but the quiet human fantasy of a do-over. Fewer grand paradoxes, more small mercies. Not “save the world,” just “save … continue reading
Why We’re Obsessed With The ’80s
There’s something about the 1980s that refuses to die. The perms have gone, the music’s been remixed a thousand times, and the clothes — mercifully — have stayed buried in lofts across Britain. Yet here we are, still watching Stranger Things, still arguing about who was the better Bond, and still getting misty-eyed over things that, if we’re honest, were mostly crap. Yes, there was magic in that decade — but it wasn’t all neon lights and shoulder pads. It was the last gasp of innocence … continue reading
One-Hit Wonders of 1986: The Definitive UK List
1986 was a strange year for the UK charts. Prince was in full pomp, Madonna was everywhere, and the Pet Shop Boys made synth-pop sound like the future. But nestled between the heavyweights, a parade of artists you'd never heard of before — and would never hear from again — dropped a single, climbed the charts, and vanished like a pint at last orders. Some of them were brilliant. Some were baffling. A few were so bad they've circled back around to brilliant. And at least one of them inspired a … continue reading
1980s British Time Travel Fiction
British writers can't stop writing time travel novels about regret. We don't do alien planets. We don't do robots with guns. We do middle-aged men reading library books about their younger selves and wondering whether the woman they dumped in 1987 might still answer the phone. I'm one of the offenders. Six time travel novels and counting, all of them anchored to some flavour of British melancholy. Across the decade I've spent in this genre I've also read perhaps fifty other British … continue reading