Time travelling

One of my NYE party decorations

I haven’t sofa surfed for ages. There’s always been some kind of chore to do, don’t get me wrong, there are still lots of chores to do; I’m just choosing not to do them. I think that means I’ve failed on one New Year Resolution, but kind of succeeded on another.

Anyway, I didn’t feel too guilty about my sofa surfing today, because I felt like I was doing something productive at the same time… time travelling.

It all started with Sunday Brunch on Channel 4 to set me up, because you can’t time travel on an empty stomach, and from there on in I was hurtling through the decades!

One Day took me through the late eighties, nineties, noughties and the early teenies with music, fashion (ish!), city-scapes, city nightlife and TV references.

Hook had me re-visiting my childhood in the early nineties and reminiscing about Christmases of days gone by. We used to watch a pantomime, en masse with friends and family, every year. One year we chose not to see the pantomime and went to the cinema to see Hook instead. It’s been one of my favourite childhood films ever since. And in fact, my Baby Bro and I still quote it at each other regularly… “In your face camel cake”.

Clueless took me through my teenage years in the late nineties. Every single Friday of them. Kim and I used to watch Clueless followed by Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet every week whilst getting ready to go out. Again, we still quote it regularly, and my thirty year old, grown up (ish) vocabulary is still heavily influenced by the content of that film.

The Tomorrow People had me squealing with excitement. CITV's Old Skool Weekend was just full of amazing childhood references. Funhouse - After-school prize-winner jealousy. Wizadora - “Sick day” guilty pleasure (before it was replaced by Loose Women). Press Gang? Fuelling future career aspirations. Knightmare - Still gives me actual nightmares sometimes! Art Attack - Where my obsession with everything oversized began. I was so happy to find The Tomorrow People on the schedule and Sky +’d it… and was then so upset when I realised that it wasn’t what I thought it was: The Girl from Tomorrow which was one of my absolute faves (I still desperately want to wear my hair band like a Transducer and paint three dots on my cheekbone)! Such a shame that The Queen’s Nose was a BBC programme… I consoled myself with Fraggle Rock.

Mr Selfridge will hopefully become my Sunday night replacement for Downton Abbey and fulfil my need for some kind of period drama on cosy winter nights. The costumes, the bouffants, the accents, the vistas of turn-of-the-century (ish) London. I have high hopes.

And the day of time travelling ended with The Iron Lady. I didn’t spend a lot of my childhood paying attention to politics, and to be frank, I don’t really now, so I'm not really drawn by that side of things in this film. I have, however, always spent a lot of my time paying attention to the changing fashions in interiors, hair, cosmetics, clothes and cars and this film showcases them in all their twentieth century glory fabulously. I love it. Oh, and Meryl. Oh how it showcases Meryl.

I should do this more often... and I should get a maid!