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All that glitters
I think it was a conflation of things that made the seventies shine for me.
My first interaction with glitter at infants school came when we were given some to make Christmas cards for our parents. It would have been on a gloomy early December day in the ‘little school’ in Brynaman that I was immediately seduced by the wondrous substance. It was hard and sharp in individual shards, but glitzy and beguiling en masse. The exoticism and excitement, held in the slim plastic tubes it came in, was almost overwhelming. To then quickly discover it was available in, not just silver and gold, but emerald green, royal blue and ruby red blew my mind and began an urgent desire to use it on as many things as I could. When stuck to some card with ‘Gloy Gum’, it transformed our meagre efforts into something to wonder at with seven-year-old jaws agape.
Around the same time, my mother retired our rather bedraggled paper chain Christmas decorations in favour of thick, lustrous strings of red, green and gold tinsel, which she pinned from corner to corner of our living room ceiling. This, alongside a new silver tinsel tree that sat on top of our TV, raised the bar of our festive efforts. I naturally came to associate the high contrast twinkle of glitter and tinsel with the excitement and glamour of Christmas. Even Blue Peter got in on the act with a series of features that taught us craftier kids (well our…
