The Simple Joys of an 80s Childhood

The best things about an 80s childhood cost between nothing and about a dollar, which is why they are so hard to explain to anybody who was not there. Described accurately, most of them sound like nothing at all.

A new notebook

Not the writing. The object. A blank notebook with a clean cover, unbent corners, and pages that had never been touched.

The first page was always written carefully, in the best handwriting available, and by page six the standard had collapsed entirely. Everybody knew this would happen and everybody did the careful first page anyway.

Peeling something

The plastic film off a new screen. Dried glue off a palm. The label off a bottle in one piece. A sticker sheet backing.

There is no defense of this. It is just satisfying, it always has been, and a kid with nothing else going on will find something to peel and give it their full attention for four minutes.

Being allowed to press the button

Whatever the button was. The lift, the pedestrian crossing, the doorbell, the one on the machine at the shop. Being handed the small mechanical task in an adult errand was a genuine promotion.

It made you briefly load-bearing in an activity that otherwise had nothing to do with you.

Change from a purchase

Being sent to the shop with a note and told to keep the change was the entire economy of childhood.

The amount was usually trivial. What mattered was that it was unaccounted for. Money that nobody was expecting back is a completely different substance from money you were given for something specific.

A really cold drink on a hot day

After being outside for four hours in summer, coming in and drinking something straight from the fridge. Fast, standing up, in one go.

Adults do not experience this because adults do not get that hot and that thirsty for that long without doing something about it earlier.

The good pen

Every kid had a pen that wrote better than the others, and it was defended. Lending it was a decision. Losing it was a bad day.

Multi-color pens with four levers were a separate category entirely, and pressing all four down at once was something everybody tried and nobody achieved cleanly.

Finding money

In a coat pocket, down the side of a chair, on the pavement. Any amount. The value was entirely in the discovery, and a coin found on the ground was worth more than the same coin handed over.

The first swing of the day

Getting to a playground and finding it empty, so no negotiation was needed about whose turn it was. Just going straight on and staying as long as you wanted.

A parcel with your name on it

Almost nothing arrived by post for a child, which is exactly what made it enormous when something did. Even a small envelope from a relative was an event, because the post was for adults and this one was not.

Cracking ice

A frozen puddle in winter, stepped on carefully at first, then decisively. The sound and the pattern of the cracks. Every kid in a cold climate did this on every frozen puddle they encountered, which over a winter is a considerable number of puddles.

The good seat

The window seat. The front seat. The chair nearest the fire. The corner of the sofa. Every household had a hierarchy of seats and it was contested constantly, with a rule system that was elaborate, inconsistent, and enforced with total conviction.

Being told you could stay up

Not a special occasion, just a night where nobody enforced the usual time. An extra forty minutes downstairs with adults watching something not aimed at you.

The content was rarely interesting. The point was being in a room you would normally have been sent out of.

What links all of it

None of these were provided. Nobody organized them, planned them, or bought them for you. They were things you noticed, found, or were incidentally allowed.

That is the actual pattern, and it explains why the list sounds so thin written down. A pleasure that was arranged for you registers as an event and gets filed accordingly. A pleasure you found yourself gets filed as something that happened to you personally, which is a much stickier category.

It is also why the answer to recreating any of this is not to buy anything. The list is mostly free and mostly still available. What is harder to arrange is the amount of unstructured time required to notice a frozen puddle and decide it is worth ten minutes.