Socialing in the 80s

My friend wanted suggestions for a pub, to host a birthday lunch, that was family friendly. She wanted a pub with a beer garden, that children could play in, that was enclosed, but that was accessible for friends without children too. I went blank. I've barely been to pubs, since moving back here, and my favourite drinking venues don't actually serve food. I knew exactly what she was after. What happened to the good old days, where parents drank in the bar and kids made their own fun playing the bingo machines, ordering spiders and losing money in the video arcade machines (which is pretty much how I spent every weekend in winter with my dad-he drank in his sportsman club, and I fed twenty cent machines into a bingo machine and kept winning rounds of schooners, which I gave away, and counter meals of schnitzels and chips and no other vegetables were served up from a kitchen that never actually had a cook on staff... and if you were really lucky, you got to persuade the kitchen volunteer to let you use the loudspeaker to announce that "Number 49, your chips are ready!").

Then I watched Roxanne, the Steve Martin movie (he scripted it, he owns it). What struck me about this movie is the absence of children-all the characters are a mythical age of mid aged maturity, older and wiser than 20 somethings, kid free, socialising in bars of a week night or sitting in courtyards eating icecream or generally enjoying the scene of a vibrant college town. It looked like the life, and in typical 80s style, all the guys wore shirts tucked into jeans, big groomed hair and were manly and available. Funny. I think these sorts of movies gave me the wrong expectations for adult life; that I was going to reach the age of maturity and magically be an adult, employed, living in a big house, and living up the single life, wearing shoulder pads. (This misconception may also have been contributed to by Cleo magazine, Days of our Lives and a range of other pop culture ephemera that I indulged in during the late 80s).