The Glory of the 80s (part of Blogger Idol)

For me the 80s was the decade of primary school and early high school. A perilous decade straddling the time from when girls were grudging school-yard rivals, whose close proximity should be avoided for fear of “girl germs” to when they became … well, possibly not so bad after all (if vaguely terrifying).

I was a bookish kid, largely because of coordination problems that didn’t really get sorted out until 1987-8. If a ball was kicked in the air, I always knew whose head it was going to come down on. The library seemed the safer option. Not that I wasn’t social – any game requiring imagination, I was certainly there.

Although, my biggest failure of imagination in the school-yard was undoubtedly on insisting when we played “G-Force” to be allowed to be the robot back at base. Despite the warnings that he did nothing, I was mad about robots and would not be gainsaid. I soon learnt why the damn robot spent so much time griping about being left at home to man the phones while G-Force were out having exciting adventures.

“Part of the team”, yeah, my right oil filter I was “part of the team”.

Of course, Transformers were much better – then you got to play an entire bunch of robots with your friends. Though playing with the toys was generally better than pretending to be the cartoon characters. Transformers were nearly as good as Lego (the two genres often blurring: more than once Cybertron, additional Autobots or the odd doomsday device was built from Lego).

I gave up transformers before entering high school, they seemed little kid stuff. Of course, as my glories of the 80s, they’re still in a crate in the attic. Along with the Lego.