Adam Marek

Check out the thunderclouds that were building up when I went training on the common last night. Beautiful.

I just heard that John Hughes died of a heart attack on Thursday. I grew up wishing that my teenage years would be like a John Hughes movie, and the few moments that came close were the most wonderful.

My friends and I used to recite lines from Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the Breakfast Club to each other. We’d sit in the dirt in the playground and plan the day we’d bunk off school, steal our dads’ Ferraris and have a wild adventure in the city. Except we never did, and our dads all drove Sierras.

I can’t listen to Simple Minds’ ‘don’t you forget about me’ without seeing Judd Nelson punch his fist in the air and feeling fucking amazing.

In a hotel room a couple of weeks ago in Dublin, I got a real 80s nostalgia craving, and sat up till 2 watching clips of Ferris Bueller and other eighties movies on You Tube. These scenes took me straight back to being 14, wondering if I’d ever date Ally Sheedy, feeling sad because I knew in my heart that it was impossible to create Kelly LeBrock on a computer.

Check out this John Hughes montage – oh God I’m welling up again.

I have a new story ‘Blinks Transport People’ on the Notes From The Underground website. It was commissioned for their new Photo Stories series, which is a collaboration with Clare Wigfall.

Each of the stories in this series is very short, and inspired by a photo, which appears alongside the story. They’ll be published in pairs – my story is in the first pair, next to a great story by Tod Wodicka.

I had a classic uncanny experience today.

I took my boys to the park to chuck a boomerang around. The only other people there were four girls who were about 11. They were playing with a baby doll, taking it out of its pram, laying it on the grass, talking to it. They took turns putting the doll onto their laps while they shot down the zip-wire with it. They were laughing and having a great time. And then one of the girls stood the doll up on its feet. It wobbled for a moment and then rolled back into the dirt. And it was then that I realised it was a real baby.

I felt like I should say something, like, ‘hey, careful, their heads come off easy at that age,’ but maybe this was normal and they’d think I was a weirdo. Is it normal for a mother to let her 11 year old daughter take her 10-month old baby to the park alone? So I said nothing. I span my kids round on the roundabout. I decided it was the baby’s mother’s responsibility. But I couldn’t help thinking the whole time, and still now, that this was a tragic local news story in the making. What do you do in a situation like that?