9 October 1988: We've Been Broken Down to the Lowest Turn

1. Whitney Houston: One Moment in Time
2. U2: Desire
3. Bobby McFerrin: Don't Worry Be Happy
4. Womack & Womack: Teardrops
5. The Hollies: He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother
6. Rick Astley: She Wants to Dance with Me
7. Erasure: A Little Respect
8. Wee Papa Girl Rappers: Wee Rule
9. Jason Donovan: Nothing Can Divide Us
10. Phil Collins: Groovy Kind of Love
11. Inner City: Big Fun
12. Pet Shop Boys: Domino Dancing
13. The Pasadenas: Riding on a Train
14. Bill Withers: Lovely Day [sunshine mix]
15. Kim Wilde: Never Trust a Stranger
16. The Beatmasters featuring P.P. Arnold: Burn It Up
17. Alexander O'Neal: Fake '88
18. Duran Duran: I Don't Want Your Love
19. T'Pau: Secret Garden
20. D Mob featuring Gary Haisman: We Call It Acieed
21. The Christians: Harvest for the World
22. Hazell Dean: Turn It Into Love
23. Bananarama: Love, Truth and Honesty
24. The Proclaimers: I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)
25. Sinitta: I Don't Believe in Miracles
26. Yello: The Race
27. Bon Jovi: Bad Medicine
28. Gloria Estefan & Miami Sound Machine: Anything for You
29. Enya: Orinoco Flow
30. Yazz & The Plastic Population: The Only Way Is Up
31. Sabrina: All of Me (Boy Oh Boy)
32. Salt 'n' Pepa: Shake Your Thang (It's Your Thing)
33. Bros: I Quit
34. Bomb the Bass: Megablast / Don't Make Me Wait
35. Julian Cope: Charlotte Anne
36. Luther Vandross: Any Love
37. Spear of Destiny: So in Love with You
38. The Commodores: Easy
39. Brother Beyond: The Harder I Try
40. Milli Vanilli: Girl You Know It's True

~~~~~

Five years after our year in England ended I was back for a visit. Not a whole lot had changed. The neighbourhoods looked very much the same, the pubs were basically identical, Mayflower looked very much as I'd left it, the London Underground had some newer, flashier cars but was still as crowded and as rickety as ever. Only two things seemed much different: everything was a lot more expensive - although it wasn't as if  prices were especially reasonable to begin with - and Essex had become a dirty word.

We might have seen this coming, mind you. For every charmingly quaint village in the north of the county - Snape Maltings, Finchingfield, Saffron Walden, Dedham - with their picturesque parish churches and village greens and centuries old cream tea shops, there were sad, go nowhere London feeder towns in the south - and no place was more nowhere than Basildon. Though we tended to refer to ourselves as living in Laindon and this held wherever we were in Essex, the farther we got from the southeast the more we began to say we were from Basildon. (If this Laindon-Basildon situation is confusing then consider the following: (a) you're not wrong and (b) Laindon was a town that was swallowed up by the Basildon New Town; it was more than simply a community but not quite a town in its own right - or that's how I understood it to be) But this New Town horror show - so perfectly summed up by The Style Council in their 1985 hit Come to Milton Keynes - almost seemed to be our little secret, one that failed to make others blush. Family friends The Torbetts and The Dicks paid us visits and had nothing but good things to say about where we lived - though they admitted much later that they were just trying to be polite. As our year was beginning to wind its way down, I began to get to know a few kids that lived nearby and they, too, didn't seem to dislike the area. If Essex was the butt of everyone's jokes then everyone was doing a great job of delicately keeping these gags from our sensitive ears.

It's likely, however, that the county became an eighties laughingstock only in retrospect. Essex and its New Town/London satellite city mentality represented Britain in that decade of Mrs Thatcher, The Sun and football hooligans; only with New Labour and Britpop and Cool Britannia and all that malarkey did it become something decidedly unsavoury. But there's the rub: we all knew perfectly well how Basildon was drab and awful, how Southend was sad and clinging to a former glory (that probably wasn't even all that glorious), how Braintree was trashy  and a bit sinister, how Brentwood was so utterly unmemorable and without merit: it just wasn't official. The stand up comedians still had Mrs Thatcher and Edwina Currie to deal with; cracks about girls called Sharon and the fathers of their children would have to wait.

Having spent the previous day in Colchester, a day which has largely been consigned to memory's compost heap, we again headed up that way on the 9th to attend a Medieval Experience just across the border in Linton, Cambridgeshire. Much like our trip to Brighton a couple weeks earlier, this was highlighted by meeting some fellow exchangees. Kelly and Andy were from California and they were so nice and fun to be around that they probably gave my sister and me a completely false impression of the many obnoxious and/or annoying American kids we'd encounter in the months to come. While the kids in Brighton were a handy source for trading aren't-we-hard-done-by sob stories, the easygoing Kelly and the happy-go-lucky Andy were a welcome antidote to the self-pity that I was certainly delving into from time to time. Being at a Medieval Experience, it was nice to have other kids to make us less self-conscious about getting all decked out in Arthurian dress - and with Andy and I each getting replica swords to complete our kit we automatically had each other to duel with. (For the next day or so I fancied myself a potential fencer, an ambition which was quickly shelved in the missed-opportunities-and-that's-fine-by-me file) As with the Brighton crew, however, our friendship with Andy and Kelly proved all too infrequent: it would be quite some time later before we met up again.

As we were hitting it off with Andy and Kelly, my parents were getting to know John and Debbie. I wasn't to know it then but they, along with their sweet little daughter Aimee, were the exchange family we would see the most over our year in England - and, indeed, I would have the pleasure of meeting them subsequently, most recently at the wedding party my parents threw for me and my wife. We'll get into more about them in the weeks and months ahead.

The Medieval Experience itself was a hoot and not just because Andy and I had the chance to catch up on our duelling chops. Never an especially well-mannered and tidy eater, I was more than happy to be informed that we'd be dining with our hands. I can't say just how authentic the whole thing was but this was an era just prior to the Nineties travel boom and such considerations were not of much importance. I'm sure the organizers and performers were trying their best to be as accurate as possible but it didn't particularly matter to those of us experiencing it; we weren't there with guidebook in hand, tips from online research and fellow travellers floating around in our minds, making sure that the jousting display was as authentic as humanly possible. It all looked very impressive and very well organized.  

Then again, we weren't aware of Essex girl jokes: what did rubes like us know anyway?

young Paul's favourite: Domino Dancing
older Paul's retro pick: Burn It Up