The worst thing about reminiscing about the 1980s for television is having to reveal you were already an adult back then. No amount of concealer can repair the damage that comes from admitting you rode the Coca-Cola Roller at the Glasgow Garden Festival back in 1988.
So it was with a certain feeling of dread that I accepted an invitation from Newsnight Scotland to speak about the decade of mullet haircuts, marching miners and eye-watering interest rates. I accepted because, like most of us, I'm a bit of a sucker for nostalgia.
The inspiration for the feature was the Scottish government's decision to release some official documents from the period in advance of the 30-year rule. The SNP has nothing to lose, and perhaps something to gain, from this magnanimity. The newly opened papers cover areas of life that seem at once familiar and oh-so distant: the decline of our industrial infrastructure and the battles to save totemic names such as the Ravenscraig and Gartcosh steel plants, the Scott Lithgow shipyard on the lower Clyde and, of course, the deep coal mines which then perforated the central belt.
It was a period of social and economic dislocation, with whole industries privatised or obliterated. Mass protests against everything from the poll tax to nuclear weapons regularly brought city centres to a halt. But by the beginning of the Noughties even the most hardened veterans of the "doomsday" years had to admit that some of the changes from those times were irreversible, and even - whisper it - rather beneficial with hindsight.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Scotland had more people living in state-owned housing than the old eastern European bloc. Surely it was a good thing that the number of home owners almost doubled from 38% to 63% in the last two decades of the 20th century?
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So by the Noughties, very few Scottish politicians or commentators outside the hard left would argue that the 1980s had been a total, unmitigated disaster from which Scotland never recovered. By, say, 2007, this country was, for many of its citizens, a more prosperous and optimistic place than in 1984.
We have a Scottish parliament whose existence is an indirect result of the Thatcher years, and that "democratic deficit" we constantly complained about. There is more choice now. More of us have a higher education. There is a flourishing arts scene, booming town centres and more leisure options than we have time to enjoy. Entrepreneurialism is no longer a dirty word. New businesses have replaced the old ones and, in most cases, the work is less dirty.
Watching the Newsnight archive footage was almost a reminder of how the decade never really died. A disconcertingly attractive Margaret Thatcher - why didn't we see it then? - was shown addressing the Tory party conference wearing a power suit with shoulders so padded they formed 90-degree angles. "A style that's making a comeback," observed the journalist Derek Bateman in his voiceover. If he visited Topshop as regularly as me, he might also have mentioned stonewashed denim, leggings, wide belts and Bananarama-style leotards - not that Mrs T, even on her attractive days, pioneered these sartorial fads. Even the music is being revisited. Electro stars like La Roux dominate the pop charts, citing Duran Duran and Erasure as influences.
But the legacy of the 1980s looked a lot more golden before the financial crisis. Suddenly, the changes of that time don't seem quite so certain or settled. Our wardrobes are crammed with Eighties retro and we are humming the same tunes. Yet in our heads, we are beginning to question some of the ideological templates put in place then.
A timely example of this came last week when the SNP government moved to end new tenants' right to buy homes rented from local authorities and housing associations. It was this policy that did more than any other to shape Scotland into the Thatcherite ideal of a property-owning democracy. A million people are said to have benefited. But the social rented sector lost half a million of its best properties as a result.
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Introducing the legislation last week, the housing minister Alex Neil said the changes would retain 18,000 properties that might otherwise have been lost and protect the substantial new investment in social housing for rent. The move was welcomed by the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, which said it would encourage its members to build. Shelter Scotland also supported the bill, noting that there are fewer public sector homes to rent than at any time since 1959, because of the right to buy. Johann Lamont, Labour's deputy leader, accused the SNP government of being stuck in a time warp.
It will be interesting to see the level of public support for the law. Right to buy is not the only reason why waiting lists for housing associations are so long. We also lack social housing today because many people refused to live in it. It was poorly constructed in the first place and maintenance was dreadful - even when councils employed armies of people to do it.
By the late 1990s, councils found themselves with properties so undesirable that they lay empty, further dragging down the neighbourhood. The only option for these "voids", as they became known, was demolition. They were replaced with a lower-density mix of homes for sale and rent . . . in itself an acceptance of the new order put in place by Conservative policy.
Yet there remains a sense that right to buy has had its day. Property no longer seems a safe place to put your money. Before the property crash, first-time buyers found it impossible, in many places, to afford a home because of rampant house-price inflation. The crash ought to have at least changed that, but much government policy has focused on keeping house prices at unrealistic levels. The credit squeeze, though now easing somewhat, still makes it difficult to raise the large deposits demanded by mortgage providers. Suddenly, social housing begins to look not like Stalinism, but quite a sensible option.
It's not just in housing that we are going back to the future. If privatisation was the great movement of the 1980s, the reverse is true now, thanks to the government bailout of the banks. Their failure can be traced right back to the City deregulation known as the "big bang" introduced during Thatcher's watch and enthusiastically accepted and extended by Labour under Blair and Brown. The big-bonus culture we so despise was also born at that time. So was the cult of consumerism, when malls replaced churches and we congregated in those glass cathedrals clutching credit cards like prayer books.
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The banks' failure to invest in industry - even after the bailout - has led many people who could not be described as socialists to demand full-scale nationalisation. Why doesn't the Bank of England simply lend directly to struggling businesses? In Scotland, there are calls for a 1970s-style industrial bank, designed to support key sectors of our economy; this still works in Germany, which never really embraced the neo-liberal economic model.
The partial nationalisation of the banks has lead to an expectation of state intervention that would have seemed anachronistic two years ago. The government-led campaign to save the Johnnie Walker jobs in Kilmarnock was reminiscent of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1971. Even those old coal mines seem suddenly quite useful. We can burn coal in a clean way, and deep mines, empty since the 1980s, may have a second life as underground storage spaces for carbon emissions.
We might all look like we have stepped out of an old Wham! video but in our heads it sometimes feels like the Eighties never happened. Politically speaking, we are wearing flares. Funny how fashions change.