Question: What is a pen used for? Answers: To write, to draw, to use as a blow pipe for sending balls of wet tissue to your classmates’ heads, to show that we’re very rich if the pen is a Mont-Blanc … What else? To rewind a cassette of course !!! And yes, do you remember, […]
Nostalgia
Flirting in the Old Days
First contact – Hi, do you have a spare cigarette, please? – Here. – Thank you. Hey, guys, those few words bring back memories? When you spotted a pretty young punkette at a concert and asked her for a cigarette pretending not to have one, while your pack was stashed in the bottom of […]
Cops and Old Cars
Like most of the readers of this article, I’m over 50, and I love rock ‘n’ roll and the 50s. I’m therefore a bit nostalgic for an era that I didn’t know, but that I tried to live, in spite of everything. How did I go about trying to get there? Well, first of all, […]
Life in Europe before the Euro
“How much is a French franc in German Deutsche marks?” “I don’t know, but it’s not much!” “And a Dutch florin, it’s worth 10 francs right?” “No. Less than that, I think.” I could extend this list with more European countries, but we oldies have surely all forgotten the exchange rates of all these currencies of […]
Adam and the Ants and Me
Adam and the Ants were huge in Australia in 1981. At least, they were huge for all the teenage girls in the country. Antmusic hit number 1 in the charts and the whole country was singing it. Me and some of my 13/14 year old friends were madly in love with Adam and the Ants. We […]
The Traditional Sunday Family Lunch
The French have a reputation of spending hours at the dinner table! And this is certainly what we do on weekends! Every Saturday or Sunday, the French invite either their family or their friends. The appetizer And when all the guests have arrived, we start with the appetizer, commonly called “the aperitif” which consists of […]
The Stray Cats and Me
Did the Stray Cats ever play in your town? As you may know, I grew up in Perth, Western Australia. In the days without internet, without any easy way to communicate with anyone outside your immediate group of friends. It wasn’t really a great place to live. We were so isolated, not just from the […]
Me and Ian Dury
Ian Dury 12 May 1942 – 27 March 2000 I first heard of Ian Dury when I was about 13 years old (1980). At that time in my life I was attending a religious school for girls, which was intended to turn me into a young lady, and not the rebellious teenager that I actually […]