Rule Britannia?

 

By the time I grew up the Empire, alleged to be the largest the world had ever seen, was slowly but surely receding into history. It was my mother's generation who were witness to its demise and who, watching from the sidelines, observed the whole vain-glorious inheritance become crushed under the feet of the new, uncaring, razor carrying, boot-lace tie, drain-pipe trousered Teddy Boy youth of the 1950s. 'Rock Around the Clock' with Chubby Checker replaced Rule the Colonies with Churchill's Conservatives.

Enter Labour, and with it the Welfare State, the 'New Look', the Festival of Britain, the Coronation, Celebrities, Soaps and Sleaze. The past, as L.P. Hartley was to write in 1953, was most certainly "a foreign country". And looking back now, as the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, so much of the past appears distant, inappropriate and largely irrelevant.

But some things remain, handed down from one generation to the next, constants in an ever changing world. Take fish for example. Always to be eaten with two forks. How disconcerting to find a place setting to include a knife or, worse still, a fish knife and fork, the epitome of suburban taste.

So it is with curtains. Most recently whilst reading Raina Cox's highly entertaining 'If the Lampshade Fits', I came across an image of curtains drawn to the centre of the window and knotted! The rules regarding curtains are simple. Lined, interlined, weighted and of sufficient material to toga Caesar's Rome, they should be gathered to each side of the window and then allowed to fall to the floor where, in casual folds of several inches, they should lie at rest. Anything else, such as 'ballet' length or 'rouched' is an anathema.

But where is all of this leading? Through the French windows, not doors, to the great outside. Here among the borders, not beds, one will admire delphiniums, not lupins, violas, not pansies, and marguerites maybe, marigolds never. Treasured alpines are content within containers, rockeries belonging to the footholds of the Alps, and for heathers, then it is to the moors of Yorkshire or the Highlands of Scotland one must be bound.

Inside the potting shed, or bothy, the steadfast 'Atco' mowing machine, unlike its modern counterpart, the 'Flymo', continues to give a lifetime of service. The 'Felco' secateurs, none other, are to hand for the cutting of rose stems, no modern hybrid teas here, and never shall a mechanical strimmer slice through the edges of the lawns of Maida Vale. Not, at least, in my lifetime!

P.S. My picture today is of a 1950s neon sign in the shape of an LP record to be played on a gramophone.

P.P.S. In the spirit of the 'New Look' of the 1950s, my weblog has accordingly been nipped and tucked.