I love the 70s. The older I get the more I love the 70s….the fashion, the music, the photos, the cars. I love the 70s, shoot me if you must.
Neatly, I was born in 1970 so the 70s, for me, were all about my childhood from 0-10. I guess it’s normal to look back at our childhood with a fond nostalgia but, really, the 70s were coolest weren’t they? All that hippy hippy shake and Ford Capris and Wagon Wheels and Trumpton and [insert your own fond 70s memory]. I am blessed to be a child of the 70s…we weren’t even metric when I was born. THAT’S how totally ‘rad’ I am. I’m Old Skool, baby, Old Skool…
If my life wasn’t packed up in a storage container I’d drag out my 70s photos to share at this point. Those slightly yellow, square, rounded corner, slightly textured shots…with ‘Date taken….Who….Where…..’ and lines printed on the back for you to fill in the gory details. Although the 70s were the ‘Chubby Years’ for me so I’m probably doing you a kindness by sparing you the fat grumpy looking kid.
When I think of my childhood I think of summer. Long, hot, summers…where the sun shone every day and we played out from morning til night. Clearly I’ve scrubbed out the other 98% of my childhood when it was freezing and it chucked it down. I think I remember it was hot/sunny because all the photos are taken on sunny days. Because film was expensive, getting photos developed was really expensive and those funny little flash bulbs that rotated on the top of your camera cost bazillion. So my parents limited their photography to sunny days and I bet there weren’t alone. Who else remembers the 70s as one long…hot…summer? And I’m not just talking about 1976 either.
Yesterday a little bit of the 70s came around to visit. The sun really WAS shining. So the boys stripped off and spent the afternoon dipping themselves in our neighbours’ huge paddling pool until their lips turned blue with cold. Then they snuggled up in towels in the sun to warm up…ran around….played with the dogs….had a picnic tea and then played out until bedtime watching their shadows grow longer and longer. Both boys were filthy when I got them home, smeared with tomato and chocolate cake and homemade blueberry sorbet (very 00s…in the 70s it would have been Walls ice cream, hard as a rock, vanilla and perhaps in a wafer sandwich if you were VERY fancy). I took it to be the sign of a good afternoon.
Pretty much every photo I took yesterday with my Big Girl’s Camera is rubbish. All the photos in this post were taken with my iphone. Apparently I can return my £3,000 of Nikon kit and just stick with my phone. So that’s good isn’t it? There’s something about the late afternoon light, ‘Colin’ the caravan and the swing which smacks me right back in my own childhood. Simple pleasures…being outside…friends…water…swings. This is the stuff of memories.
When my boys are grown I hope they’ll look back to their childhood with the same kind of nostalgia that I do for my own. I’m sure they don’t realise just how lucky they are to live the lives they do, why should they? But to live on a farm (albeit not ours!), right next to their best friends in the world, pottering around the place and over to each other’s houses when they fancy, near the sea, me at home with them…they are so very fortunate. I feel their fortune ‘for’ them, but I hope they will look back and feel it too. And I hope they will get over their inevitable teenage fury that we moved out of London to be here when “IT’S SOOOOOOOOO BORING!!!!”. If they have their own children, I assume they’ll understand why we moved. If not, well tant pis, we did it for all the right reasons.
The 00s are the new 70s you know. I’m recreating it right here. One strangely clad child at a time.
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