Everything 90's

Well yes there was all that but on the plus side we got rid of the Tories once and for all after all the years of misery and with zero chance of school leavers getting a job as unemployment was still high. I still remember the omens in Spitting Image which showed Thatcher as a madwoman and finally being left on her own in the Commons. I know a lot of people that were glad to see the back of her, and that also included finally snuffing it. Labour wasn't always great but it had to be a damn sight better than the Tories and for a time that proved to be so.

Of course one the biggest things that happened in the 90's the explosion of BRITPOP here and across the world with the likes of BLUR, OASIS, PULP etc, although the intense rivalry between Blur and Oasis was stoked by the tabloids(very nasty that! ) and created a real competition. The Gallaghers were mouthy Northerners against the more sedate Albarn and Southern chaps. Oasis actually thought they were the best in the world and for a time they were along with others a great British import, which was likened to the British invasion of the 1960's by the Beatles, Stones etc. One thing was sure, the music got even better and a lot more interesting.

I remember getting an analogue satellite television box in the 90's. Initially it was so we could watch other channels like The Children's Channel, UKGold and the like. However, I also discovered that we could get foreign channels like most of the German ones RTL, RTL II, DSF, sports channel and others. I even recognised the German versions of Blockbusters and A Question of Sport. Now this was great for my Dad to watch athletics from Germany live, but I also found that late night at weekends there were dubbed adult films, a weird game show where the contestants stripped off (Tutti Frutti)as well as the hostesses and The Adult Channel broadcast their stuff-ten minute Dish of the Day stripper which was free. I though I might subscribe so paid £7.99 for a year and every night was something good so the video recorder was going to be put to good use. I also discovered that DSF showed stripping linked to a sport or pastime. It was post-teen heaven and some of the films on other channels were quite something although it took some getting used to with the German dubbing.

Of course like all innovations it was eventually superseded by digital satellite but it wouldn't be until much, much later that we got a SKY dish and box. I might add that I have loads of recordings still on video and spent a few years (when we eventually got a DVD recorder/player) ripping stuff to DVD and then using a ripping tool on the PC finally converting to a format that could be posted to a forum.

It was interesting to see how many ex Page 3 girls appeared on some of these game shows like Colpo Grosso or Tutti Frutti but while we had the analogue satellite box it was party time every night!

Another thing that occurred to me last night was the futile invention of cold-calling when looking for work or a job. I am sure some of you have done it, rung a number or gone into a place on the off chance that they might have be looking for someone. Anyway I thought I would related a funny story that happened to me when looking for work. I did a course called Restart-although how you can restart something you've not actually started is anyone's guess - anyway one of the things we were told was it might be a good idea to cold-call, i.e. ring up a company local to you and ask if they might have any vacancies. I mulled this over and I finally decided to ring up our local B & Q store(which I might add closed several years later resulting in the loss of over 1,000 jobs!) and did what I was told to do and ask for the General Manager or the Admin Manager. I duly did this and the receptionist asked me what it was about. I told her I was making enquiries about the possibility of maybe sending my CV in. She said she didn't know where the General Manager was, so I then asked for the name of the Admin Officer. Her exact words were(and I am not kidding) "Oh I don't know what his first name is but we call him Buffy!" Cue phone down in disgust my end-what an airhead! I mean can you imagine writing a letter to the Adminstration Officer of a huge retail store like B & Q starting it "Dear Buffy," No, neither could I and I didn't bother.

I'm entitling this memory BOMBS! why? well in my lifetime I never thought I would ever hear or experience one but in the 90's we still had the IRA problem and several bombings took place far too close for comfort. The first one I heard was one Friday night/Saturday morning whilst I was reading in my room. At first I thought it might have been a gas main but then seconds later there was a shockwave that came across and my summation was it was a BOMB! Later it was announced that a large warehouse near Staples Corner, North London had been blown up. A second bombing took place literally up the road from me in the early hours of a morning - an Army Recruitment Centre suffered a bombing but I didn't hear it. The third one was a car outside a Jewish centre in the same road only further back-again I didn't hear it but it did a hell of a lot of damage to the car. I also remember the Corn Exchange building being blown up, which I am pretty sure I heard one day. Another one was at the BBC Television Centre, London when a taxi blew up outside the gates-thankfully no one was killed.

You really don't expect something like that or the others on your doorstep but when you hear about it happening near you, it really brought it home just how dangerous the IRA were back then. I count my lucky stars that my mother and her friend cancelled a trip to Harrod's one day - the very same day that a bomb went off in a bin outside. She could have been caught in that and it still gives me a cold chill every time I remember that. I never thought that the IRA would eventually disappear(thanks to the Northern Irish peace talks-the Good Friday Agreement) and peace would return to both London and Belfast.

It sort of counts. Back in the early 90's my school had a reunion or a celebration to mark its tenth anniversary and among the people that turned up were a lot of my 'enemies', some of whom were complete headcases back then. They came back to see old teachers and the building where they mostly got into trouble. There was also a 'naughty' book that recorded their various misdemeanours and some wanted photocopies of it. Why? well next to some entries was the phrase "this is a very rude boy!" Now back in the 80's that was a Jamaican moniker for being cool(don't ask me why) so they took that phrase 'rude boy' and wore as a badge of honour - hence them wanting photocopies of the pages. It struck me that the 90's changed all perception of what it was like to grow up a youngster - you always wished you could go back to those heady days but somehow you were lucky to make it through the 80's to the 90's and now you were more grown up, having left school and gone out into the big wide world of work OR unemployment as was the case for many of us.

Music changed in the 1990(in fact from 1986 onwards) thanks to Stock, Aitken and Waterman who made even a teaboy a star(Rick Astley). The charts were dominated by their music and artists such as Rick, Sonya, Samantha Fox, Mel & Kim, etc and they even had their own hit with a little ditty called ROAD BLOCK which I dubbed at the time 'more like CAR CRASH' it was that bad but it was a hit with clubbers. Around that time we also had the dying embers of Acid House stuff and somehow music was changing again and soon we would be hit with grime, street and other weird genres that seem like household names today. And who amongst us could forget one of their biggest stars Kylie Minogue, who went from a moppet-like kid and teen on Neighbours(Australia) to a worldwide singing sensation along with a co-star(and at the time rumoured boyfriend off screen) Jason Donovan. I still cringe at Especially For You though, god I hated that song it was so twee and saccharine-like.

August 1999 - that was not only the time when I was doing a course on computing and watching the total eclipse that occured, although not very much in London - the place around me got darker and darker at lunchtime and eerily the birds started chirriping. We only saw a thumbnail of the eclipse but it was still a great sight. No this month is more remembered as the time I first went online, using the Freeserve system and that funny looking router that looked like a green sea creature with eyes. The first thing I put into a search engine was "Natalie Banus naked pics" who at the time was one my favourite Page 3 girls(for obvious reasons). This was of course well before Google came along and the content for such pics was restricted to private websites you had to sign up to or pay for OR the old Yahoo groups which turned out to be a goldmine. I also e-mailed a chap who had a good website that had a lot of unseen Page 3 pics and he got back to me and offered to send me as many pics of Natalie I wanted and yes she was NAKED!! Result! We corresponded and I sent him some stuff for his website - in the end I would help him run it! He mentioned a newsgroup that was full of great stuff called televisionx and so I decided to join that and ended up posting loads of stuff before it closed down.

Back before Google the search engines available were Altavista, Lycos and DogPile each one had different results but were good in their time. I also used to go on other websites(now defunct) but I still use miniclip.com and play a pool game each time, been playing it for decades. 1990's really saw the rise of the business machines like AMSTRADs and other such machines. I had an AMSTRAD 8 series computer & printer (courtesy of my brother-in-law) with the green screen and LOCOSCRIPT word processing software. I had used such machines on the course I was on and on another course in 1991 I had actually prepared worksheet to use it for teaching new recruits that came along and I ended up helping the Admin Manager(Joan) who had taken me under her wing. I did a course called Training for Trainers for 6 months and I ended up with letters after my name A.M.I.T.D.(Associate Member of the Institute of Training and Development)