I'm a child of the 80s: From Athena to Our Price, roller skates to mix tapes how we passed the time and why it was the best

Despite the 1980s being synonymous with the rise of the ‘yuppies’, where grown-ups just wanted more of everything, the kids still made do with not very much, and that was actually pretty perfect.

Heading to the shops definitely made up a good chunk of a kid’s spare time back then, but actually buying something was a rarity. ‘Browsing’ (and not of the web-based variety) was a lasting memory of 80s/90s shopping.

Browsing Athena’s vast selection of posters, flipping through the images of anything from Van Gogh’s The Starry Night to a moody black and white photo of a muscular man holding a baby - they had it all! Browsing the latest albums in Our Price. Browsing books in WHSmith. Browsing pretty much anything known to man in Woolworths.

And after a good day browsing, we went home and made do with posters of the latest heartthrobs (Bros obviously) torn out of Smash Hits magazine, using them to adorn every spare inch of our bedroom walls and ceilings. Afterwards, we would make mix tapes from the radio and make do with songs missing the very beginning and/or end and with the occasional voiceover from the DJ if we didn’t hit pause quickly enough.

We yearned for outdoor time too. Going into the garden to hula hoop, roller skate or make potions (think George’s Marvellous Medicine, not Harry Potter) or heading to the park to have a go on death-trap giant slides and seesaws. Admittedly, there was a great deal more permitted peril in our everyday lives than you generally see today.

While various ailments, the inability to stay up past 11pm and the increasing number of grey hairs I’m finding, all confirm my ‘getting old’ status, nothing, perhaps, is more damning than my growing realisation that ‘it was better in my day’. But there we have it, I’m now firmly in that camp, and find myself telling my children on a regular basis how I had nothing like the amount of ‘stuff’ they have to keep them entertained and I was much happier for it.

I do have enough humility to realise however that it wasn’t just my childhood that was brilliant, it’s just that childhood itself is brilliant. So little responsibility, an imagination yet to be dampened by the mundanity of life and vast amounts of time in which to do whatever you please. Bliss.

I maintain if I could go back to any age, it would be 6. What a glorious time to be alive! And I hope, in decades to come, my little people will themselves look back upon their childhood with the same nostalgia, and it will be their turn to tell younger generations how there was no better time than the 2010s/20s to be a kid. Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as ‘child of the 80s’ though. Just saying.

What are your most nostalgic moments growing up in the 1980s? Let me know in the comments below.