Blog Post | 1993 I Hate You
The Good Old Days #GRR
So many people look back and think fondly about the good old days.
I, on the other hand, look back and instantly recall my pink shell suit with green stripes and miss that little bastard in the same way that my face misses warts.
By age 12, in 1993, me and my favourite pink shell suit had been through a lot together.
Like the time I wore the bottom half to my swimming lesson where we had to jump in wearing our normal clothes to test out our “real-life emergency situation” skills.
As we both sank to the bottom of the pool, I clearly remember taking a moment or two to wonder how on earth my shell suit and I had not died together on any prior occasion to this considering how close we both lived to open water.
She had filled with water, expanded to the size of a house, and dragged me to the bottom. Totally useless.
Back then, no self-respecting twelve-year-old ever wanted to be the one class idiot who set an example to the rest of their class, let alone be the kid to prove that their smug swimming teacher had a good point.
Clearly, I wasn't the one making the mistake that day, but my useless shell suit had a lot to answer for.
What’s more, my shell suit had a thin, white lining that, when things got sunny and hot, stuck to me like a wet, soggy heated vacuum.
On the outside, I felt like Marylin Monroe standing on that windy air vent.
On the inside, I felt like Theresa May beating up Brexit with a baseball bat.
Open fires, sharp objects, felt tip pens, oil, grease, ketchup, more sharp objects, rain, thunderstorms, snow, fireworks…. The list goes on.
The problem was that we looked so good together.
My tom-boy frame, her green, subtle stripes that detracted from my impressive tummy tyre for a twelve-year-old girl which the school nurse wasn’t so impressed with.
My “leaning tower of quiff”, crafted from half a can of hairspray every morning, her shiny, shimmering pink material that detracted from my pasty face full of freckles.
And finally, her lightweight craftmanship which shaved a few extra seconds off my knock-a-door-run efforts from my furious neighbours that I vowed, and failed, to quit doing when I was ten.
I thought we would love each other no matter what.
Apparently, they say, time heals, but roll on twenty-five years later and it turns out that I looked like shit and literally nobody in the early ’90s had ever told me —bastards.
Now I think about it, I’m not even sure that shell suits were even in fashion back then. In the 1980s… yes. But by 1993 everybody else had moved onto Naf Naf, whilst me and my pink shell suit had only just begun to make an appearance.
The good old days, my arse. Maybe if you wore Naf Naf and floated it was, but I had a shit shell suit and a near death experience to prove it was anything but.
