The old man has been sending over stuff he’s found in my dear departed Aunt’s papers. Amongst the nuggets was a postcard we’d sent her just after we’d moved to London. There is nothing interesting in what we wrote, tho the card is interesting in itself being a picture of The Prince and (then) Princess of Wales and Little Willy, the heir to the throne. Of course there was no ‘spare’ at that time and James Hewitt had not yet, we assume, had his wicked way with the undernourished waif Lady Di was soon to become.
Nevertheless, even with Willy so young, you can clearly see now how unhappy and detached she had already become!!
Peculiarly and particularly I like the way Little Willy is poking his tongue out at his father. I wonder if this was a learned behaviour or an instinctive response??
I digress… the date was August 1984. The wife was about to start her degree at The City University, and I was about to discover it wasn’t easy to find work even in London. A year later, I was off to the Polytechnic of Central London… a powerful name with a proud history thrown away for a mess of pottage when it decided to become ‘The University of Westminster’ (cough, spit… ). But that was all in the future.
How times change eh?? What I find even harder to believe is that The Phantom and I will be ‘celebrating’ the twentieth year of our graduation from PCL in just a few short months. Twenty years ago we were settling down to the ongoing slog of revision and the writing of interminable projects.
I can’t recall what technology The Phantom was using at the time… carbon and graphite based I think… tho somehow I’m managed to acquire that (then) miracle of modern technology my Amstrad PCW and Joyce (i.e. LocoScript) far and away the most user friendly word processing software around for us plebs! 🙂
So… in a few months remind me to start singing “It was 20 years ago today….” etc. 😀
The Eclectic Interweb 
Actually, dear boy, I had an Amstrad PCW. I think you had the slightly swankier PC version…
Though I agree I can’t believe it was twenty years ago.
We will have to arrange something with The Legal Eagle… Some sort of synchronised Champagne-Popping Event Perhaps…
I will have to rummage around and find some photos. Maybe I can find one of all of us….
My apologies to your spectral self. It was so long ago I’d entirely forgotten! It’s strange how the mind sometimes just wipes out important information!:)
I *do* remember that I’d added an RS232 interface to mine because someone suggested it was a ‘good idea’. Thing was I never found out how to use it to connect to the outside world! The only useful addition was doubling the ram to a massive 512K and that *did* make a huge difference to the speed and usability.
Just after writing the original post I looked up Locoscript and was pleased to learn both Joyce, and her sister version for the PC, are still on sale. This time I managed to restrain myself. 😀
As for photos… did any of us have cameras back then?? 🙂