As the calendar year of 2012 draws to a close this gives me the opportunity to catch up on a couple of images and notable events that I have as yet not posted over the last, hmmmm, 6 months or so. I hope to do recollect these events in the Next 6 months or so – so stay tuned.

As a segue, let’s begin with cookies and winter solstice - and what is solstice without cookies, you may ask?

Delicious Linzer cookies, which if you are a fan, know that these cookies are jam filled. As the dough is being prepared, I am tasked with choosing the jam; opening the cupboard the pickings are slim. Near the very back I pull a half litre vintage jar of jam. In fact, both the jar and the jam within are vintage - 1986 to be exact, yes, that is a 26-year-old pear and plum jam.

As I appreciated the irregular blue glass of this old Mason jar, and whether or not this jam is still safe to eat, I began to think of what 1986 brought me/us:

In North America we had the dynamic duo of actor turned politician Ronald Reagan and his side kick the biggest chin in the north Brian Mulroney - (shudder); The iron lady, Margaret Thatcher held fast to the reigns in Great Britain,Microsoft holds its first public offering of stock; Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh Plus. It features a 8 MHz 68000 processor, 1 MB RAM, SCSI connector for hard drive support, and an 800 kB 3.5-inch floppy drive. Price is US$2600. Chernobyl nuclear power station goes critical and explodes; in the night sky Halley’s comet burns a trail as it passes by; Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrates 73 seconds after launch killing everyone on board. Back on earth “Rock Me Amadeus” by Falco played on the radios while Sega, Atari and Nintendo kept children glued to their ‘joysticks”.

Bon Jovi gave love a bad name, while “New Wavers” Wang Chung(ed) tonight. The Beastie boys changed the face and direction of music with album Licensed to ill; The Dead Kennedys played their last show and later that year their front man Jello Biafra battles the right wing crazies - Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) with stated goal of saving children from “music deemed to be violent, have drug use or be sexual” via labeling albums with Parental Advisory stickers. Don’t worry, he won, unfortunately we did not. Mind you, now all children know which music to buy thanks to the Parental Advisory sticker! Ferris Bueller took the day off and we also learned that there are places in the universe not to go alone, in part two of the Alien quadrilogy. In the visual arts we lost some of the greats Henry Moore, Joseph Beuys, Georgia O’Keeffe, leaving us all lots to think about and enjoy.

Yes, all this from one jar of jam!

1986 was a personally pivotal year for me and looking back it was a very interesting time to be alive, and made for some mouth-watering cookies too.