The Canny Time Traveller

Fitted sheets are the work of the Devil…

For a start, they are a lie.  Often they don’t fit.  They’re not deep enough.  Or the elastic’s too feeble.    They are a con. Get one corner on and another pings off, get two done,  turn your back and the first  slips triumphantly off –  until you’re running around the bed trapping  corners like a man trying to keep plates spinning.

Even if you get them done, there’s no guarantee of success.    They’re not designed for real people in real beds.  Just when you’re nicely dozing off they slip and slide and sneak up around the edge of the bed until you’re lying in a bumpy tangled knot.  No fun at all.

First world problems yes – but  the household advice columns of posh newspaper regularly feature  niggles about fitted sheets – how to make them fit, how to iron them, fold them, make them look inviting.

The simple answer is not to use them at all.  Stick to flat sheets.  Tuck them in with hospital corners – hardly rocket science and  YouTube will show you how – and they will stay in place.  The weight of your body is keeping them down not dragging them out.  

 If you like to iron sheets, then flat sheets are the business  and will look wonderful and reward your effort.

A well made bed is a thing of beauty.  Many psychological studies have shown that making your bed every morning is a help to health and happiness – that sense of achievement, a pleasing neatness.  An illusion of order in your life.

Getting into a well made bed every night is an even greater treat.  Especially if the sheets actually stay where they’re put.

BIG wedding short marriage say the old wives.

And it looks as though they’ve been right all along.  New research has just shown that yes, the flashier the wedding, the less likely it is the marriage is going to last.

Since 2000 one in ten weddings that cost more that £20,000  lasted less than three years.  Russell Brand and Katy Perry – parade of elephants and camels and a gift of a Bengal tiger for the bride – lasted about a year.

So hooray for small weddings.

That was one of the minor  benefits of Covid.  Even without the camels and elephants, all those huge weddings with 100 guests, day do,  evening do, three dresses,  vintage buses, owls as ring bearers, favours, sweetie stalls, bands, disco and a string quartet and all that  couldn’t happen.  Instead couples  who went ahead with the weddings were forced into a small ceremony, close family and friends and hardly any fuss at all.

Ang guess  what – they are just as much married as if they’d spent the price of a small house.

1950s weddings were generally small family events.  Mad grannies, drunken uncles and only a few closest friends.

For a start in the 1950s bride and groom were much younger.  All the way through the 1950s the average age of the groom was 22 and the bride 20.  Most  – apart from the lads who’d done national service – would still be living at home.  Marriage was the only way they were getting to get away and get a life of their own  – especially a comfortable sex life – and the emphasis was very much on couples setting up home together for the first time.

Overwhelmingly people got married in church, the reception was held close by and because most people didn’t have cars, they walked between the two.  Church hall, village hall.  Families often did the catering themselves. Dresses were made by the local seamstress and most men just got a new suit which would last for the next twenty years or so.

After the meal, the toasts, the speeches,  and the best man reading out the cards and telegrams, guests would mingle a while then bride and groom would change into their going away outfits.  Then they would go away.

And that was it.

A pleasant occasion but the wedding was just a means to an end – for the marriage and the new life.

Now most couples have been living together for years and have all the toasters and coffee makers they need, they are pressurised into spending even more time and effort  into making the day stand out.  But they’ve missed the point. The day itself was  never that important   – it was only special because of because of what it represented.

Small weddings are special –  less stress, less hassle, less money – a chance for people actually to meet and talk to each other.  Usually a good thing…

If you want  a big hooly for all your friends then have one later.  Without the word “wedding” in the planning, the bill will be half the price

Keep it simple.  It’s just one day.  Then there’s the rest of your lives….

Listen to:  Love and Marriage  by Frank Sinatra

So why red roses anyway?

Not many of those growing in your average British February. From Tudor until Victorian times at least the traditional Valentine’s gift  from man to woman was a pair of gloves.  Much more practical and long lasting.

For much of last century an anonymous card was as much excitement as anyone could expect.  Lots of manoeuvring to get other people to address them so  the writing on the envelope wasn’t a give-away…

Then we discovered air freight…

Now a million red roses a day are loaded onto conveyor belts in Kenya and flown across the world to the wholesale flower markets in Amsterdam, from where they are taken in refrigerated lorries all over Europe.  After such a journey, no wonder so many  wilt by nightfall.

Some of our red roses come from Colombia, where at least legal rose growing has replaced illegal cocaine production.  Roses grown in hot houses in Amsterdam are more local but use more fuel for heat.  So lose lose really.

And that’s just for the ones that sell.  Even more wasteful for those that don’t when demand drops like a stone on February 15^th

But now that’s only a part of the whole Valentine’s Day industry.  Nothing to do with romance and shy secret protestations of love but all to do with how much money big business can make from the soft-hearted. Even Percy Pig is on the act. Money-grubber.

There’s even, God help us , a move for this love to spread through the family with parents buying Valentine’s presents for children.   Isn’t that really a bit creepy?

Anyway, the whole thing’s become such a cliché  as to become utterly meaningless.

So  forget the red roses, think local and seasonal instead – huge bunches of snowdrops or daffodils.

Doesn’t cost the earth – in any sense – and shows you’ve put some thought into it.

What’s not to love?

Listen to:   Secret Love  by Doris Day

Want to live like the Queen?  Then start switching off lights…

If  there’s one single characteristic that sums up the 1950s it’s a horror of waste.   That’s why they keep so much stuff  – left over food, cupboards full of  clothes, blankets, china, or sheds full of old coffee jars full of rusting screws.  They might come in useful some day…

Meanwhile, we’re  the generation of de-cluttering.    Minimalism is good.  Throw stuff out!   Buy a cheap T shirt, wear it a few times and chuck it.  Why not? It’s cheap and easy to buy a new one.   

We  clear our wardrobes, fill those bin bags, take stuff to tip or  charity shops – and then go out and buy more stuff to replace it all.

Not just clothes, big items like furniture too.  Sofas used to last a lifetime, now they’re lucky to make it to the next bank holiday sale.

In the 1950s  they hadn’t heard of recycling.  It was just what people did.  

People  used things  until they fell apart – and then they  stuck them back together and used them some more.  

“Waste not, want not” and “Make do and mend” weren’t  pretty slogans on a tea towel, they were the basic philosophies of life deeply ingrained into most of the population.

The Queen, with her famous thrift – even now she apparently goes round Buckingham Palace switching off unnecessary lights –  is just  a typical product of her generation.

Despite her fabulous wealth, she’s famous for recycling her clothes – some outfits are re-worked many years later – and her  handbags last  for forty years or more.  These days apparently the royal household newspapers are shredded to make bedding for the many horses, worn  sheets are  darned,  water-saving devices are fitted in every  loo to cut down on the royal flush.  She even  re-uses wrapping paper

No detail is too small.  She’s even apparently saving waste after her death.  As part of the funeral ceremony for a monarch, the Lord Chamberlain snaps his white stave of office over the coffin to signify the end of his personal service to that queen or king.  Her Majesty has said that they can have a detachable stave – so once it’s apparently snapped in half, it can be  clicked together and used throughout the next reign.

Now that really is attention to detail.

And if one of the world’s richest women is keen not to waste money and resources then maybe we too should try living more royally.

Classic film:  Rebel Without a Cause,  James, Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo as delinquent teenagers.  The generation wars had begun…

NOVEMBER 5 2021 : getting back to the future

The 1950s invented the credit card, modems,  barcodes, Barbie, The Pill – and teenagers and rock’n’ roll.

What a decade!    Where would today’s music be without Bill Hayley, Little Richard,  Elvis and Tommy Steele?  They got us up and dancing

Without the energy and inventiveness of the 50s, our world would look very different and pretty dreary.

The people of the 1950s certainly wanted fun.

Most of them had been through long haul of the war and the grey post war years as the world adjusted to a new normality.  But it wasn’t  a quick flip.  The country needed to be rebuilt – literally.  People waited  – and waited – for new homes, new clothes, shelves full of food.    Rationing didn’t end until 1954.

Yet only  a few years later the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was telling the country “You’ve never had it so good.”   The world had changed  and people were determined to make the most of it – enjoying better food, housing, travel  and opportunities than they could have dreamt of years before.

They  made up for lost time, rocked around the clock  bought televisions and washing machines,  ate Wimpy burgers,  experimented with frozen good, foreign holidays and even dreamed of space travel,

But they still had their feet on the ground.  They knew the value of things, knew what was really important and weren’t going to waste the new opportunities and prosperity on things that didn’t matter.

Clever people,  those from the 1950s.  We could learn thing or two from them…