I said I want to hear like I could IN the eighties, not in MY eighties

Chiffticcachiffticcachiffticca- Thanks for that, my pre-deaf commuting friend. You may have an ipod, but you will join me with the rest of the post-sony-walkman ‘huh?-ers’ in twenty years time, unless you crank your volume down a few notches. In walkman days (mid-eighties), you had your bootleg tapes in nifty bags strapped to your side, those bite-sized earphones slipping charmlessly off your gelled and bleached flicked fringe, and the tinny reproduction of your records was enough to get you through a long day until Who’s the Boss or The Golden Girls came on.

To this day, there are records which I have never listened to in their entirety. The cassette tapes were always too short- so, being economical, I’d have to leave out a song or two, and fit two almost-albums on one tape. I wonder if they were good songs?

In Cape Town, people carried huge ‘beat-boxes’ around on their shoulders- in the eighties, bigger was better- massive sound systems which nowadays would be used to power triple-storey nightclubs, or a Jonas Brother’s gig.

This was before the widespread health and safety panics of the late eighties- no packaging warnings then. You could crank up the sound in your earphones, and, well, it was taken for granted that if you did that you’d go deaf. Sure, carrying a tape-deck the size of a teenager’s coffin was going to ruin your shoulder ligaments, but it was worth it for the adoring glances of the chick in the fluorescent halter top, or the frightened retreating backs of the 8-track generation.

In those days, you could walk on escalators with sandals, smoke cigarettes with any orifice you chose to, and give a child under the age of five a packet of fireworks and a Swiss Army knife for their birthday.

*TV programmes poked fun at fat people, retarded people, midgets, yellow people, black people... Remember ‘Diff’rent Strokes’? Babes could be happily categorised as male playthings. *(Deliberate use of non-pc words, ok?)

How did any of us survive the eighties? Why am I not being pushed around in a wheelchair, trying to crank up my hearing aid so that I can hear minorities/frequently targeted abusees in any form cry when I hurl abuse at them?

Perhaps I was saved by the politically correct generation. Maybe I just made it. It was a close call, but I know better than to judge my human sidekicks based on skin colour, sexual orientation, gender, or physical challenge of any sort.

If I was more litigious, I’d take the eighties to court, for making me have bad hair, ringing ears and for wearing those little Japanese pumps that were in fashion for a while. But, and this is a lesson we can all learn from, no matter what generation, photographs can be burned, or, even better, nowadays, adjusted to suit a more genteel way of life.

Gnarly, hey?