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.
13 posts
Saturday Morning TV Before Streaming
There was one morning a week where nine-year-old me would willingly leap out of bed, and it certainly wasn’t a school day. Saturday. Down the stairs while the rest of thew house slumbered…
Continue reading →The Sound of 1979
At eight years old, I didn’t understand that the country had begun to shift under my feet. I only knew that Top of the Pops looked stranger than the year before. Blokes with white faces and…
Continue reading →The TV Adverts Every 80s Child Can Still Recite
I cannot reliably remember where I left my keys an hour ago. I have stood in a supermarket aisle, blindly staring at a shelf with no memory of the items I mentally listed on the drive to said…
Continue reading →What a Night Out Cost in 1992
In 1992, I turned twenty-one. I had a wage packet, a suit that I sincerely believed made me look like a man of the world, and the bulletproof confidence of a young man who believed he was a bona…
Continue reading →The Roads Not Taken (and Why the Other One Probably Led to a Cul-de-Sac)
Everyone keeps a private museum of the lives they never lived. Mine has an entire wing devoted to the version of me who stayed in the property business, drives something German and expensive, and…
Continue reading →Holidays Before easyJet (When a Fortnight in the Sun Meant Sleeping in a Tent)
There is a whole generation of British adults who genuinely believe a holiday has always meant tapping a phone, paying £34 to a Hungarian airline and standing in a queue at Luton at half four in…
Continue reading →Why Nostalgia Makes the Past Feel Better Than It Really Deserves
Somewhere in a loft in Surrey sits a cardboard box, and inside it lives 1983. There’s a Panini album three-quarters full, a copy of BMX Bandits on VHS, and the memory of a Saturday morning…
Continue reading →The 1990s Gadgets We Thought Would Change the World
Every decade reckons it has glimpsed the future. The nineties reckoned it harder than most, and did so while wearing a fleece and a pair of Global Hypercolour trousers that turned a damp shade…
Continue reading →Second Chances: Do People Really Turn Things Around
I have built most of a career on a single, faintly ridiculous premise: what if you could go back and do it all again, only properly this time? My characters are forever being handed a fresh crack…
Continue reading →Sweets and Crisps the 80s Quietly Killed Off
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…
Continue reading →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…
Continue reading →The Toys Every 1980s Kid Begged For at Christmas
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…
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