Every November, roughly when the tinsel appeared in Woolworths, an entire generation of British children launched a campaign of psychological warfare against their parents. One objective. The toy. Not a toy; the toy. The one the telly had promised would transform our small lives, and which, in a sobering number of cases, would sit broken or abandoned by teatime on Boxing Day. I speak as a veteran of this front line. My childhood Christmases ran on a Provident doorstep loan, paid off in weekly … continue reading
Nostalgia
Looking back without the rose tint. Keith A Pearson on the people, places and tat of decades past: the raw material of his time-travel fiction.
What Life Cost in 1985 (When 77p Bought You a Pint)
I spend an unhealthy amount of my working life in the past. Not literally; my GP would have something to say about that. But a fair chunk of my fiction lives there, and you cannot drop a character into, say, 1985 without knowing what a packet of crisps might cost. Price a pint wrong, a reader in Mansfield will email you about it. So I've done the research. Quite a lot of it, frankly, most of it while pretending it counts as proper work. Here, then, is roughly what life cost in Britain in … continue reading