Back to the eighties

There are many good explanations as to why I have poor memory skills.

Drinking. Smoking. Styling mousse over-indulgence in my early 20s. But there is one less obvious one...

Whilst the march of time seems the most plausible, scientific scenario, the gentle decay of my grey matter is only a minor contributory factor in the great scheme of things. For sure, genetics comes into it too – my Mum had a similarly scatterbrained storage system, whereby important stuff like her bank card PIN eluded her, but what I wore on my 4th birthday was recalled with photographic detail.

I’m utterly hopeless with road names and numbers. If I head to the tropical climes of the South, I know I use the M6 for the first bit, but I’m damned if I can remember any of the others. I know the name of my road in Arnside, and I recognise a lot of the other names if they’re mentioned, but can’t quite work out which name goes with what road. It would explain why I didn’t get that job as an ambulance driver.

A wise man (I think it was Homer Simpson) once said “Every time I learn something new, it pushes something old out of my brain”. Unfortunately, once the storage space sign for my brain had clicked over to ‘full’, very little of anything new I’ve experienced since has stuck.

The tricky part of all this is that my fat head isn’t full of science, art, great poetry, wisdom, or even remembrances of people I’ve met. Nope – my brain got filled up with 80s music information, and then shut down some time in 1989.

So instead of knowing any Shakespeare, I know all the lyrics to 99 Red Balloons. There’s no encyclopaedic recall of shattering political moments from the 90s. Instead, I can tell you what year Vienna was kept off the number one spot by Shaddap You Face. Who won the FA Cup in 1985? Sure you wouldn’t prefer to know what the ghostly voice actually says at the start of Queen’s “One Vision”? Or why the original Self Control by Raf is actually superior to Laura Branigan’s version?

Until now, this has been a bit of a handicap. I’ve managed to learn just enough new stuff to survive the modern era, but beyond that, little has moved on in 25 years. And yes, that probably does include my fashion sense.

All that knowledge, slopping around inside my bonce, occasionally spilling out when I’ve had a drink at a party, and scaring other guests as I ramble on about which a-ha album was best. Wasted. Doomed to be of no use.

Until now. To raise some cash for a charitable event, I have been volunteered to run an 80s music quiz. Finally – I can prove to the world that I am actually knowledgeable about something!

I’m off to shave my sideburns into points, dig out my legwarmers and snood, and put on my pointlessly thin leather tie. Woohoo! It’s my time!

Shame it’s over two decades late.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column in the North West Evening Mail on the 6th of September 2013, where it was retitled "Memory banks full up by 1989". You can view the version used by the paper on their website here

The column received a couple of noticeable edits from The Mail: The start of one sentence vanished, the Laura Braningan/Raf reference was removed, and the Ambulance driver joke disappeared too.

I struggled a bit with this one - at the point I needed to write the column, I sat in front of my laptop, completely bereft of anything resembling an interesting idea. Good job you can always rely on the 80s, eh? I bloody love the 80s...

(The alphabetical romp through my CD collection is into late XTC, and the rather excellent "Apple Venus" album from 1998.)

The Schaf Shuffle

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