However, there are certain things that I am glad stayed in the nineties. Things that make me glad that times have changed and we have moved on. Here are some of these things...
• The Internet.
Remember picking up the telephone when someone was using the crappy old dial up Internet in a different room? You'd practically be deafened by screeches that sounded like 100 cats being brutally murdered. What the hell was that noise?! The Internet would take ages to connect, again with a completely bizarre noise (you're doing that noise in your head now, aren't you?!). Web pages were only in Times New Roman and routinely took 15 minutes to load. Not good.
• Hair accessories.
Remember when fluorescent scrunchies and crushed velvet scrunchies were all the rage? Hmm massive fashion error. Remember owning every colour of butterfly clip and clipping them in all over your hair when you were going out somewhere smart? Even more dodgy was the hair mascara we'd smear on in the hope of looking cool and fashionable. I mean, really? Hair mascara? Who thought of that?
3. Photos. Remember when you used to pay £8.99 for 24 prints in Boots and you had to wait a week to pick them up? Then when you got there you'd be so excited you wouldn't make it out of the shop before opening the envelope to have a look only to find that every picture was blurred because the flash hadn't worked? No clicking a button to remove red eyes or Instagram filters to improve your complexion. Just rubbish photos that cost a bloody fortune.
• Teletext
You know when you want to check the premier league table you can do it on your mobile in approximately 30 seconds? Or even better, ask Siri to find it for you. Well remember the days when you had to use teletext. First you had to find sport, then football, then league tables and then it'd come up with '2/15 Division One' at the top of the screen. You had 14 other leagues to get through before the Premier League was back on...there was no way of flicking through them, you just had to wait it out. Then when, after 8 long minutes you finally got there, if you didn't press the hold button quick enough, you had to wait another 8 long minutes to see it again. Yawn.
• Encyclopaedias.
Yes, these boring books may have been good to find out the names of the past Kings of England or how many bones a diplodocus skeleton has, but they couldn't answer questions as quickly and as accurately as Google, let's be honest. Homework projects took forever, made especially difficult if you struggled with alphabetical order. What a waste of my time. Children of today don't know how easy they have it when they can just copy and paste a Wikipedia page for their homework. Jealous.
• Dodgy jewellery.
Anklets, tattoo chokers and toe rings. I really don't have to say any more.
•Cassettes.
Remember when you wanted to rewind a tape you had to turn it over and fast forward the other side?! Seriously why not just add a rewind button? And then there was this...
• Some serious fashion disasters. Slouchy socks, fluorescent everything, shell suits, tracksuits, a lot of velvet. Just awful. Really, really awful. I owned one of these for goodness' sake. I thought I looked nice.
• The first mobiles.
Remember the pull out aerials? The scratch off panel you needed to top up your phone on pay as you go? The crashed phone lines on Christmas Day as everyone tried to top up at the same time and the crowded networks every New Year's Eve? Interchangeable covers that you'd happily spend £30 on because it was 'so clever' and such a novelty? SIM cards that only stored 10 messages, so my teenage life was spent debating over which 9 messages were most important to keep! I'll never moan about my 14GB storage on my iPhone again.
So you see, it wasn't all good. We need to be more thankful for Google, Siri and Apple. We moan that the youth of today are obsessed with technology and no longer socialise like we used to but I'll be honest, I'm just glad they've stopped wearing hair mascara and toe rings.
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