Home life
Modern times
Alice Thomas Ellis
Iwent out again last Tuesday evening; something I do as seldom as possible because I like to get to bed around 9 o'clock, but this was a special occasion the opening of an exhibition of new work by one of my favourite human beings the Welsh painter, Kyffin Williams. I mean the Welsh painter because I can't think of any others off-hand, not Welsh ones who paint pictures of Wales. The Welsh tradi- tion on the whole seems to be aural and oral rather than visual and the Principality is littered with some real architectural horrors. It was all right as long as everyone stuck to using the indigenous materials for building but now quite often when the house seems .to be in need of repair they move out, leaving it to fall down, and build themselves a new little number from simu- lated brick a yard or two from the old one. I know a valley where there are two
beautiful farmhouses quietly rotting while the owner lives in a neo-Georgian edifice which looks dashed silly sitting there amidst the grey granite and the green grass. It has the appearance of something that someone had been taking somewhere, putting it down for a moment while he goes off for a cup of tea, and reminds us of the plaque in Harley Street which announces that Florence Nightingale left her hospital on this site to go off to the Crimea. 'Thoughtless, that,' muses Janet as we drive past on our way to John Lewis to buy hooks and eyes. 'Untidy. Though I sup- pose if she had to leave it somewhere Harley Street must have seemed as good a place as any.'
The necessity of travelling miles to buy hooks and eyes is another aspect of mod- ern life that does funny things to the blood pressure. You can buy futons in Camden Town, and oriental rugs and Portuguese pottery and fresh ginger and leather trous- ers and hot samosas and dirty books and budgerigars, but no hooks and eyes. Haberdashers and ironmongers have ceased to trade and we have to go to John Lewis if we need a new mop head too. The planners are plotting to build a new shop- ping complex all over the High Street and you can bet it won't sell hooks and eyes. It will sell creased cotton frocks and Peruvian woollies and Indian bangles and the pi- geons will lodge wherever they find a toe hold, the winos will pee in its portals and old chip wrappers will drift sullenly on the unexpected eddies and currents of wind that it will undoubtedly cause to form. I can't think why the planners seem to be immune to the disenchantment that the rest of the community feels in relation to their developments. Do they say to them- selves, 'Oh well, maybe that wasn't so successful but we'll get it right next time'? Are they just hopelessly optimistic? I can see that the prospect of gain must colour their motives but it doesn't seem quite that simple. I have a nasty feeling that they believe in what they're doing. There is a proselytising air somewhere as though they know what's best for us and if we don't like it that's all very regrettable but hardly their fault.
There is also a chill rumour abroad that our local baker is about to close down. It's a small shop which has been there for years and years and just once in living memory have I been the only customer present.
This was by some odd fluke since it is usually jammed with people buying crusty twists and large wholemeals and seedcake, and millers stagger in from the street with sacks of flour saying 'mind your backs' and a dusty person with muscular forearms and a white hat and apron stands there to receive them. In the winter if you time it right you can buy bread hot from the oven and stuff it under your coat to temper the blasts from the development sites. There used to be a large grocer's shop next door to it where they made their own sausages — real ones that burst on contact with the hot frying pan — but they closed down soon after a fire in the shop on the other side half cooked all the tinned goods. We bought some cans of hot dogs for a kiddo's birthday party and when my mother opened one a stream of putrefaction shot up into her hair and all over her glasses. She wasn't half cross. I would've forgiven them that because they had wheels of farmhouse cheese and real black pudding too, but the shop is now two new shops. They sell watches that tell you the date and play tunes in one and video cassettes in the other. Our neighbour Gwynne came in yesterday for a drink and not to waste any time he brought a gadget that stores his articles in itself and because they stood in need of transmitting he put some little rubber mufflers on the telephone and his gadget chattered away in gadgetese to some fellow gadget; which is jolly clever and a flying leap for technology but what I want to know is why is it so damn difficult to buy hooks and eyes?
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