all images courtesy the artist | used with permission Erica Ward is a California-born ink and watercolor artist who has called Tokyo her home for over 10 years. Inspired by Japanese designs and imagery, as well as the ever-changing landscape of Tokyo, Ward reinterprets everyday sights and objects in surreal ways within her artworks, asking […] Related posts: The Tokyoiter Presents Diverse Visions of Tokyo Louis Vuitton Tokyo City Guide &TOKYO: City of Tokyo Announces New Logo

I remember film for cameras. You couldn't just wander around with a smartphone snapping willynilly, you needed special film like Colourprint II designed for instant loading cameras. You bought a box of film from the shop, in this case Boots, and had to manoeuvre the cartridge into your camera without accidentally overexposing it on the way in. This particular film only had space for 12 pictures so you had to take photos really sparingly or you'd run out before the end of the holiday. There was always a best before date, in this case May 1980, and note the depressing news that PRICE DOES NOT INCLUDE PROCESSING. Every film had to be sent away after use, in this case dropped into Boots, and then you'd go back a few days later and excitedly flick through the blurry messes you'd taken. No 'dodgy' photos in those days, Mr Chemist was watching. If you're a certain age you probably remember film for cameras too, also I'm aware you can still get it for certain retro devices, but my word instant photography has moved on in the last fifty years. 24 cards featuring Dr Who And His Enemies just as Tom Baker hit his peak. You got 4 characters at a time, each of which had to be pushed out of its card before you could play with them in front of the colourful alien scene on the back of the packet. I never got the full set, instead I ended up with two Yetis, also I was only 10 so didn't remember any Dr Who stories containing a Quark or White Robot. Gordon Archer did the artwork and they're now eminently collectable, not that I realised this at the time. I also remember Magic Roundabout pencil toppers in Ricicles and Klondike Pete comics in Golden Nuggets, as will you if you're a certain age, and wow breakfasts got a lot duller when they stopped putting random freebies in cereal packets. plastic viewer with two eyepieces and then you could buy all sorts of discs on all sorts of topics to slot into them. Each 'reel' had 14 transparencies, and by viewing them in pairs you got to see seven 3D images as the disc rotated. This set's Wombles-themed from 1973, with three discs each bringing to life one of the stories from the stop-motion TV series. Ideally someone else read the text from the booklet out loud while you were clicking through, or else you knew the story off by heart because you'd watched them over and over. In the absence of video recorders, this is how we filled our afternoons. If you're of a certain age you'll remember Viewmasters too, maybe any age because they're been around since 1939 and are still in production. Originally the main content was tourist-related, so for example I have another set of reels from Niagara Falls, but eventually storytelling for children took over and in 2008 they stopped making scenic panoramas altogether. Letraset made some stunners - and pick a decorative style for a bedroom cupboard or something more sober for the front of a presentation. Of course you had to try to keep the line straight or the end result looked wonky, plus the letters had a tendency to eventually rub off, but if you're of a certain age you will very much remember dry-transfer lettering. comments if(postComments['91851351325181'] != null){document.write(' (' + postComments['91851351325181'] + ')')}else{document.write(' (0)')}; I remember Pocketeers. They were a series of hand-held non-electronic games released by Palitoy in the late 1970s and my brother and I were totally target audience. Each came in a green sleeve and generally what you got was a plastic box with some kind of clever mechanical game inside. Time Up was a maze through which you had to try to roll a small silver ball, scoring up to 100 points according to how far you got before a mechanical timer halted your progress. I also owned Steeplechase which was a mini-obstacle course, The Derby which was a wheel-turning four horse race and Pinball which was self-explanatory and ideal for 10 year-olds who couldn't go into pubs yet. My brother had Cup Final and Golf, the latter with a teensy player you took out of the box and set up to hit teensy balls into a teensy hole. We never got the full set of Pocketeers because they cost 99p at the Co-op and that was beyond our pocket money but they were a much-loved possession that filled many an afternoon and I remember them very fondly. boiled sweet produced by Trebor, named because they had a hard flavour outside and a soft sherbet inside. My absolute favourites were strawberries and cream Double Agents, numbered 004, closely followed by lime and chocolate (as pictured, 003). All the sweet wrappers had coded messages on them which could be unravelled if you found the packet with the right Spy Information printed on the inside (a simple substitution code but with all the words written backwards). Trebor often ran special offers - they sent me a Fingerprint Kit in 1978 in return for four wrappers and a 10p coin. Double Agents would have been the perfect sweet to eat while reading the KnowHow Book of Spycraft, an Usborne publication which I read and reread and which may still be one of the best books of all time. You may remember none of this, or you may have taken everything to heart and learned to reveal absolutely nothing. Space 1999. I must have got through a lot of lollies in the summer of 1976 because I've got a dozen of them, also they stopped hiding picture cards inside the wrappers the following year. The artwork wasn't great because the real Dr Helena Russell looked considerably more realistic than that. As for tea cards we weren't a great consumer at the time so my grandmothers funnelled all their Brooke Bond freebies my way, and between us we managed to fill the entire album of The Race Into Space (1971), History of Aviation (1972) and The Sea - Our Other World (1974). Cuppas have never been so exciting since. comments if(postComments['91851351325182'] != null){document.write(' (' + postComments['91851351325182'] + ')')}else{document.write(' (0)')}; I remember ink cartridges. This is a pack of 10 Parker ink cartridges for my Parker fountain pen, cursive script being an essential part of a 1970s education. You needed a stash of cartridges because at any minute your nib might go a bit scratchy as the ink ran out and that could be the end of the world if you were in the middle of a crucial essay. I always plumped for black ink rather than the usual Royal Blue, either because I thought black looked cooler or because in the early days we only had a bottle of black Quink ink in the house. Also I note that this particular pack of ink cartridges is unopened, this because there was once a threshold in my life when the need to use a fountain pen became redundant and my lovely Parkers now sit in a drawer. In a way it's a damned shame, but also a good thing because I'm not forever hunting a sheet of blotting paper and my fingers no longer look like they're decaying from frostbite, indeed hardly anything needs writing any more and when it does biros and fibre tips have totally won out. green plastic rectangle you could slot into a payphone and make a call without the need for coins. It meant you had to make a purchase in a shop before you could make a call, but BT smiled because their payphones were no longer full of cash and a target for theft. Instead a strip on the front of the card was heated and 'erased' so they knew how many units you'd used, and if you could read the bumps you knew how many you had left. I think mine's fully used up which is just as well because cardphone technology was phased out in 1996 and otherwise I'd have wasted some of my sunk cost. You may remember BT Phonecards if you're old enough, but mainly when people get nostalgic about payphones it's all about dropping coins in slots and what the minimum coin was and giving three rings and how you had to press Button A and Button B, and one day people who use smartphones will be just as retrospectively tedious. pocket pets which you had to nurture so they grew up properly and didn't die. Feed them right and clear up their poop and they might grow from baby to child to adult, but neglect them for too long and they'd get into bad habits or waste away and go up to heaven like an angel. Eventually you learnt it was OK to go to sleep at night because they'd still be alive when you woke up, but like today's phones they were always burning a hole in your pocket begging for attention. I know they still make Tamagotchis but this is one of the first generation circa 1997, not that I was still a child but there's no age limit on novelty zeitgeist gadgets, and I'm hoping that a lot of you who didn't remember any of the earlier things will definitely remember this. I remember being 30. I got given a birthday card with this badge on... '30 and red hot' ...and I wore it at work all day. I didn't think I was red hot at the time but I look back now and sigh, recognising I was far more red hot than I thought I was and considerably red hotter than I am now, relatively speaking, indeed they don't make '60 and red hot' badges and they wouldn't sell anyway. But it's all too easy to spend your time looking back and sighing about the past, and droning on about the past, and fixating about the past, indeed focusing all your thoughts on the past, whereas the present is all we've got and the future is all we can change. Remember that.

45 45 Squared 25) MARKET SQUARE, N9 Borough of Enfield, 70m×50m Market Square in Edmonton. New not old, enclosed not open, basic not aspirational, blouses not yogawear, also you can't drive a vehicle into it which I think is a first in this year-long series. Come with me to the heart of Edmonton Green Shopping Centre, N9's sinuous concrete stripmall. fairly typical town centre until the late 1960s when the newly-formed Enfield council decided to bulldoze the majority in favour of full-on retail redevelopment. Frederick Gibberd & Co (of Harlow fame) came up with an innovative brutalist concoction mixing tower blocks with shopping opportunities and car parks, while Edmonton Green was substantially remodelled for through traffic. A new bus station replaced the old marketplace and all the stalls were moved into a large covered square at the core of the new development. North Mall bears off from one corner, South Mall from the opposite corner and a lowlit connector to the outside world from one side, all feeding shoppers into Market Square. Five parallel bands of glass let the light in. The original stalls are long gone, replaced by brighter permanent units with standard fascias. Some are small with space for key-cutting, engraving or a nail bar, a few are substantially larger and the majority appropriate for medium-sized traders in luggage, Caribbean groceries or dried nuts. The three prime corner units are all occupied by greengrocers, such is the demand for low-priced fruit and veg hereabouts, all neatly arrayed in bands of red, orange and green across hundreds of plastic bowls. Why walk all the way to Asda or Lidl when Letherbarrow's has all the loose tomatoes, peppers and grapes any family could need? Then there's Crystal Meats who are from the shrinkwrapped tray school of butchery, any three for £10, also Fashion Express who sell those huge checked bags ideal for taking washing to the launderette. It's all impressively tidy. outer edge of the square, the remaining beacons including JD Sports and William Hill, although the draw was considerably higher when Superdrug was still a Tesco. As for the Railway Tavern this claims to be a traditional pub, and indeed the original did stand by the level crossing on the Green for years, but this glum replacement has all the character of a dingy unit in the corner of a postwar market. Oh and there's also an upstairs, assuming you can get there. For some impractical reason it's only accessible up a single tissue-strewn staircase, or an adjacent lift, so first floor businesses must suffer terribly from low footfall. That said if you want the Turkish accountants, the special needs theatre or the local MP's office, you're more likely to be on a mission than just ambling by. What's unexpected is that after you've walked round the balcony a separate passage heads out onto the open roof... and into a street in the sky. A lot of councils tried mall-top living in the 70s, notably in Wood Green, but it's still surprising to see a row of eight townhouses on top of Clarks and Cardfactory, complete with washing hanging on the line and a lady sipping coffee in her front garden. My initial conclusion was that Edmonton Green Shopping Centre was a postwar success, still very well used and with a minimum of empty units. Then I remembered that there is essentially nowhere else for Edmonton's shoppers to go, the exterior retail offering having been so comprehensively extinguished, so of course tumbleweed has been held at bay. At least Market Square itself remains a cut above what most towns of this size offer, still appealingly blessed with everyday essentials, so long as you don't look round the edge or go upstairs.