News & views

Thankfully these pages seem to be loading at normal speed now, rather than at snail’s pace. For most people. Not for me, as my wireless dongle keeps disconnecting and has had to be disabled.

I’ve had to resort to my slow (backup) wifi connection, which is a bit like being back on a dial-up connection, for anyone who remembers those.

I’m mentioning this predicament mainly because I love the word ‘dongle’, and don’t get much cause to use it.

Despite the disabled dongle, this rusty old burger van of a web presence trundles on in the slow lane, with the brightly-lit articulated lorry of the City of York Council’s ‘York800′ ‘York Stories’ project looming in the rear-view mirror.

Before social media provided us with convenient ways of demonstrating our tastes to the world, we had badges.

Proof that we had a veritable barrage of badges to choose from comes from the York Community Bookshop badge list (PDF), recently rediscovered among various other yellowing papers from the 80s.

It dates, I believe, from 1983. Its front cover includes the slogan ‘This is the Age of the BADGE!’

York Community Bookshop, which is long gone, was at 73 Walmgate. In 1983 I was a frequent visitor, perusing the badges and CND literature, and buying a copy of The Female Eunuch.

The 8 page badge list is a reminder of the political, environmental and cultural concerns of the early 1980s.

Many witty and memorable slogans in those pages. Special mention has to go to the badge near the end of the list: ‘WEARING BADGES IS NOT ENOUGH’.