Bravery. That’s what’s called for, at least for many, to do Tara’s Gallery this week. Because the theme is The Eighties. So there’s megatons of opportunity for embarrassment.

Not from here though, as I don’t have much by way of photos from the 80s — at least not scanned or readily to hand — and besides we’ve never been ones for taking loads of snapshots of each other. However I have found these …

This first (from 1984) is me (centre left) with my parents at the private view of Jolly Hockey Sticks, an exhibition centred around girls school stories curated by Noreen at what is now the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green.

Note my already spreading waistline and the Young’s brewery tie. I’m only surprised I don’t obviously have a glass of wine: I would have needed it because this was time when we were paying 17½% interest on our mortgage (3% above base rate). But we survived and even paid the mortgage off several years early. Oh for the “good old days”, formerly known as “these trying times”!

This is the little terraced house I was brought up in during the ’50s and ’60s. It’s seen here in the estate agent’s mugshot from when my parents sold it and moved to Norwich in 1988. Built around 1937 these were the late-30s equivalent of the Victorian “2-up, 2-down”.

Note the state of the garden wall! Those walls were forever falling down as they had poor foundations and were apparently built on an old field ditch!

And finally this is the first cat Noreen and I had. Well Floss (not our choice of name, he was a rescue) and Pickle came at the same time almost as soon as we had our own house in 1981. This is a serendipitous capture from sometime in the early/mid-80s. The cats didn’t wear collars for very long: they rubbed the fur off their necks and the bells were useless at stopping them chasing birds as they just learnt to run with their chins down to muffle the sound!

I’ve not partaken in Tara’s Gallery for a couple of weeks. This has been partly due to the lack of available hours in the day and partly as the last couple of subjects haven’t grabbed me.

But I have to do this week’s Gallery as the subject is something dear to my heart: books!

And yet I find I have no photos of books. Except for this one.

This was my home office, my desk, about three years ago.

For the last several years I was working I was lucky enough to be able to work from home much of the time. Despite being a project manager much of what I was doing could be done remotely: I had email, a mobile phone, a fax, a laptop. And because my teams were geographically spread meetings were held by teleconference. It actually worked well, and saved the company huge amounts of cash and travel time.

A couple of years into retirement it doesn’t look a lot different. The laptop isn’t there so often, and the fax machine has gone.

The books have been reorganised but are largely the same. These are my working books; the ones I use every day; just a couple of hundred of the thousands in the house.

Here it is today; when I was in the middle of writing this and even with the image above on the screen!

See still lots of books, bigger geraniums and chillies creeping into the top right corner — not a whole lot different!