Whatever happened in the '80s?

After my epiphany yesterday when I was transported back to the '70s courtesy of the Buzzcocks, I sat on the bus this morning mulling over the decades and I realised I've lost half one somewhere. Half a decade, I mean.

Over the first couple of years of the '80s I was at university in Cardiff (Croeso y Caerdydd), then a spell on the dole and then the bright lights and golden pavements of London, living first in Vauxhall for a year or so and then moving down to Clapham. I recall being sacked from my first job (in a photocopying shop off Oxford Street) and then settling down into ACAS and serving teas and beers to both sides during the miners strike when they came along for arbitration (Arthur Scargill gave us a huge bag of sweets as a thank you for working into the wee small hours - nothing from management, of course!). That takes me up to about 1984.

I don't really have any strong memories until about 1988 at which time I was working in Fulham Unemployment Benefit Office, caseloading people to get them into work, into training, onto other benefits and generally off the unemployment register. I was quite good at that job.

HIV and AIDS had appeared by then and, since St Stephen's hospital in Chelsea (which is no longer there) was one of the few places actively treating sufferers then I had a goodly number of them on my caseload. I suppose a lot (most?) of them are dead now. It was terrible seeing ostensibly healthy men one week and then two weeks later seeing them again and they'd changed colour, massively dropped weight to skin and bone and sometimes not able to string words into a full sentence. A mix of the disease and early drug treatments I suppose. Some brave men wanting training so they could set up support groups and suchlike. They were generally treated badly by the system with all the scares of the 'gay plague' so I did what I could (and I'm pleased to say that my colleagues in other offices did as well).

I remember a heroin addict who was the same age as me to within a couple of days who was trying radical treatment to come off, with huge doses of methadone under medical supervision. Both of her brothers were doing time for dealing. I remember a Scottish woman whose family had been killed in Beirut and she was the sole survivor of the bomb who needed help with housing and dentistry (a confidence thing) - I supplied a few phone numbers and I got a gushing letter of thanks from her a couple of months later saying she was back on her feet and starting a new career. I remember a young woman from Roehampton with a Princess Di haircut who didn't know where Charing Cross was - she thought it was the hospital up the road in Hammersmith and didn't realise there was a place a few miles east with the same name.

I liked that job but I outgrew it and at the end of the '80s (1990 to be precise) I moved into the Employment Department and bought my flat in Streatham.

So, what happened between 1984 and 1988? I don't really know. I worked at ACAS and lived in Clapham but that's about it. Now, I could understand it if I lost those years in a haze of booze and drugs but I didn't. I didn't live the life depicted in the 'Taboo' musical (although flatmates went clubbing in Soho and to the WAGG club and all that stuff). Music even passed me by over those years - I seem to have come alive again musically with Michelle Shocked, the Indigo Girls and Kirsty MacColl - I can quite distictly remember walking across Clapham Common during a summer bus strike with them being played on my walkman radio. Robert Plant ('Manic Nirvana') is also in there somewhere. And I went to Egypt - my first 'exotic' holiday.

Suggestions on a postcard please...