Reaching week four of lockdown is a reminder that California was the first State to realise that social distancing was a necessary step in reducing deaths from the coronavirus pandemic. The Sunshine State’s leadership, thus far, has been calm, considered and given confidence that it is making difficult decisions in a thoughtful and intentional way. But this week also signals that four weeks on from the stay at home order the future is still unclear.
It’s obviously an anxious time thinking about family, friends and colleagues in the UK and I wish you all well. Watching the UK’s current dance of damage limitation over PPE and the non-answers about deaths in the health service is a reminder that, as one publication put it, there is a ‘vacuum’ at the head of Government. A vacuum would probably do a better job because at least it accepts that its function is to clean up the mess and suck it up, rather than posture and blow hot air.
Constraints on travel, meeting and hospitality make for restless minds and the only real option is to dream of places far away or to look backwards to better times. I’m going to cover distant places in a later blog but I find myself, on a daily basis, wondering how people I know around the globe are doing. Bono once sang about ‘trying to throw your arms around the world’ which seemed supportive of my mood until, in the same song, he reminded me that ‘a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle’.
The sentiment is true except for the fact that I am the resident tea-maker in the house – it’s one of the areas where English genetic advantages are obvious . In that role I was trying to explain about the Teasmade and how it was a mark of the aspiring middle class in the 1970s. The first automatic tea-maker patent was actually in 1891 by the wonderfully named Samuel Rowbottom. But it is the Goblin Teasmade, dating from 1931, that lingers in the memory as the noisy, complicated beast that made stewed tea from under-heated water.
This started a walk down memory lane about emerging signs of the British working class becoming a middle class and set the scene for monetarism, globalism and the end of the post-war social consensus. Consumerism and conspicuous consumption blossomed and US pop acts, TV series and films dominated the airwaves. Strange that it all happened in a decade the country endured a three-day week, a year with two General Elections and a drought.
There was an obsession with carpets as people moved from functional, low-cost floor covering to being knowledgeable about twists, fibres, density and weight. Even kitchens became carpeted rather than having the type of sticky underfoot, luridly patterned, vinyl beloved by my grandmother. The word ‘shag’ became all about quality carpet rather than water-birds, tobacco, lockdown hair styles, or some other form of deviation from the norm.
Then there were holidays in Spain for the adventurous who would rather deal with Latinate disdain than Welsh hostility. In the era when Silvia topped the charts with Y Viva Espana, the sign of the aspiring middle class was ten days in Benidorm and a winter tan that could be topped up with a home sunbed. Nobody cared about the long-term effects of sun exposure as coconut oil was slathered to ensure flesh was fried and lime juice was squirted in hair to provide highlights atop sunburnt bodies that owed more to pie consumption than Baywatch. As it happens Baywatch didn’t arrive in the UK until the late 1980s – perhaps a sign of how far we advanced in that decade.
Spanish holidays led to a passion for cocktails served from a home bar in a kitchen where a high, island table had been formed out of MDF. The ultimate touch was having bar stools that allowed you to while away the English winter sipping on a Pina Colada while dreaming about Typically Tropical’s promise of ‘going to Barbados’. Even for the middle class that hope was more a wish, sustained by Del Trotter’s motto that ‘next year we’ll be millionaires’, than a reality.
I was surprised to learn that the Barbados song was the brainchild of two Welsh engineers, Jeff Calvert and Max West. It song inspired a 1999 cover by Dutch Eurodance group, the Vengaboys, called ‘We’re Going to Ibiza’, which has the distinction of the main chorus line sounding like ‘whoa, I’m going to eat pizza’. From Wales to Barbados to Holland and then back to Spain – you can’t argue that this blog doesn’t get around.
Back in my 1970s time capsule a balaclava was still considered an ideal Christmas present and often knitted by a loving grandmother. Words like sombrero, beret and fez became increasingly popular although anyone who came to school wearing one would pay the consequences and carry the bruises. Maybe that’s why I spent several troubled months where I didn’t understand that baklava was something you ate rather than a Greek form of headwear.
And there was the brief flirtation with nylon sheets in dayglo colours which combined with nylon pyjamas to carry a serious risk of static electric shocks while sliding uncontrollably around the bed. New cars were a dream that could almost certainly be fulfilled with ubiquitous hire-purchase and owning a house became a defining feature of the change in society. Being paid weekly, or sometimes daily, in cash, was giving gave way to bank accounts, cheques and even credit cards.
It’s an era where the tension between the certainties of the past and the hopes for the future is captured almost perfectly in the late, great Victoria Woods’ epic Let’s Do It. The song tells the story of a libidinous woman and a jaundiced man. The woman is seeking excitement, passion and novelty while the man clings to domesticity, DIY and dreariness.
The romp reminds us of the time that avocado was a lewd and licentious fruit for the bohemian and a hostess trolley was the middle-class housewives dream. Grouting, lagging and thermal vests were the preserve of the sensible and the cautious. The line ‘beat me on the bottom with the Woman’s Weekly’ is a nine-word summary of how old values were being torn up (or perhaps rolled up) and the country was working to embrace the future.
My father once told me that it was important to ‘laugh at life’ in all its inanity, confusion and uncertainty which seems like good advice right now. I offer up Let’s Do It as a small service to help with that process during these troubled and uncertain times. Enjoy (at a reasonable distance), keep smiling (behind the mask) and keep safe.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay