To the Manor Born

Making Plans for Nigel: More Autobiography

2026-08-11T08:20:52.971-07:00

All things bright and beautiful

Back we go down memory lane...

Dramatis Personae:
Our parents, who got married soon after the war and had two children: Emma and me (Lucy). We moved into a big (inconvenient, cold) house in the country (Linchmere) while my father struggled as a barrister. They counted the pennies.

But they had plans for us. We were going to become well-behaved, compliant children. They proceeded on the “children live with nanny on a separate floor” principle. They didn’t want to live WITH us. P’s family were high establishment, but Mum’s family had lived in a series of insanitary cottages and done a moonlight flit when the rent came due. I can’t imagine her really caring about having perfect little upper middle class children. But she seemed to mind the most.

The dining room, with huge mahogany table, was just inside the front door – it was actually the back door, leading straight into a gents’ loo. When we all ate in there, P used to give us fascinating facts from the New Scientist, or tell funny stories from the war. Barman: “Can’t make up your mind? How about a nice Harpic and custard, sir?” Then P earned a lot of money from a case and his career took off. They could make the layout changes they’d been dreaming of. The kitchen became the dining room, the previous dining room became his office. And Nanny left.

But once in the old dining room I was eating a boiled egg and the yolk ran down the outside of the shell. I couldn’t eat it, but P insisted. Mum joined in and it became a screaming row between them. “She’s MY CHILD!” After that my eggs were hard-boiled. (Principle: Children must eat what’s put before them. And eat up everything on their plate. It doesn't just induce obedience, it avoids wasting money.)

Also “Don’t saw, cut!” when trying to cut up cold mutton that Emma said was like boiled lino. When I had to cut my birthday cake Mum would put her large hands over mine and cut it for me – hurting my hands in the process. (In the 60s we got serrated steak knives. Surely the only way is to saw?)

We had a lovely dining room now and a new blond wood table, even a breakfast bar by the window. But no more science facts, no more funny stories. Instead, constant yelling about table manners. "Lean over your plate and the food won't go down your front!" Well, nobody told me. P to M: “Show them how you do it.” She licked her lips instead of using a napkin. Did he think she spent all day teaching us table manners? (She had “help” – why was she still “tired”?)

As I’ve said, they had a plan for when the servants left – we would be the servants. But they never told us what to do, or showed us how. P would just shout “Jump up! Jump up! Help your mother!” Every day. She didn’t want help. Again, did he think she was managing us when he wasn’t there?

I realised at the time that they were trying to live as if they had servants when they only had a cleaning lady. I realised at the time that children’s teeth weren’t strong enough to chew boiled mutton – or hands strong enough to cut it. (And it was the dentist, not they, who told me: "If you brush your teeth you won't get fillings.")

I was quite small, about 7, when they decided I would empty the bins as my “chore”. They cornered me next to the Welsh dresser and presented me with the wicker wastepaper basket from the sitting room and told me to empty it. Shouting. I did and said nothing. Eventually I put out a foot and pushed it over. They ran round in circles screaming “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” I exaggerate, but not very much.

The basket was almost my height. I’d have had to pick it up with my arms round it. Put it down, open the kitchen door (or did we still have a bead curtain?). Put it down, open the back door. Put it down, take the lid off the dustbin. Pick it up, empty it into the dustbin. Impossible. And I didn’t know that you emptied bins into the dustbin. I didn’t think about it.

Reading their minds, they thought this was "disobedience". P had commanded the “men” in the war. Why didn't I follow orders, like a squaddie? He told me once that I was “perverse”. Me: “I don’t know what perverse MEANS!” Actually I’d worked it out from the context. Bin-emptying was never mentioned again.

One day as usual I knocked something over at lunch – a glass of water. “Go into the kitchen and get a cloth to mop it up.” I came back with the floor cloth. Yell, yell, yell. Scream, scream, scream. I’d never noticed what kind of cloth you mopped up a spill with, or where I could find one.

They turned a back room into a playroom for us and all our toys were put there. If we wandered into the living room it was: “You’ve got a playroom now. This is OUR playroom.”

There was some special chocolate in a blue and gold wrapper. We all had a square, and the remainder was put in the “sweet cupboard”. We were given one sweet after lunch, to train us not to have a “sweet tooth”. Of course I took the rest and ate it all. I screwed up the paper and stuffed into the corner of the downstairs loo. “Did you take the chocolate in the gold paper?” “No.” To me, that paper was blue. I honestly thought they were talking about a different piece of chocolate.

Screaming rows from downstairs after we’d gone to bed. Now they had a child that LIED! The atmosphere went on for three days. Eventually my older sister asked me in a calm voice, “Did you take the chocolate that was in the cupboard?” Me: “Yes.” They probably gave me a telling off. Did they ask me why I’d “lied”?

We were given money boxes – one in the shape of a postbox, one like a real cashbox. If we wanted something we couldn’t afford (like a plastic umbrella printed with ballet dancers), we were told to “save up” till we had enough. We never did any such thing. Children must learn the value of money! But we didn't.

We spent all our pocket money – pennies – on cheap sweets. Until recently I ate whole Aeros for dinner. I now have diabetes. “Proper food” was part of the programme. “You don’t need to add sugar, it’s sweet enough, it’s got sugar in it!” One day nobody stopped me when I added sugar to cereal. I ended up with an inedible bowlful of sugar. I’ve written about the meals elsewhere.

Was the Ministry of Food still giving out pamphlets about child nutrition: carbohydrates, green vegetables, protein? Rationing was in force until I was three. Mum told me much later that as a child (often fostered) she was always hungry because it was the fashion to avoid “over-feeding” children. If you asked for a snack, you got an apple.

In Ireland on holiday, a friend came round to say hello. He wanted to shake hands with us all. When he'd gone, yell, yell, yell; scream, scream, scream. "Look people in the eyes when you shake hands with them!" Well, how about warning me beforehand? How about role-playing the scenario? Have you never noticed I am acutely shy?

When I was about seven, we visited a friend or relative who, we were told, lived in a flat with a glass roof. I was disappointed to find that it was a half-glass roof like a conservatory. She had provided a buffet lunch. P said to me “cut us some pieces of cheese”. There were some table knives but I couldn’t see a cheese knife. I was afraid of getting it wrong. I said “With what – shall I cut it?” Ton of bricks. Ridiculous! There are a whole heap of knives!

“Ha ha, with what shall I cut it, dear Liza, dear Liza?” They teased me about that for years, too. “And she was sitting there opposite a whole heap of knives!” But they never asked me to do things like that at home, and didn't know whether I could or not. Were they trying to pretend that we were all much more grown-up than we were?

When I went away to boarding school aged 10, Mum wrote and said she was getting me a travelling alarm clock for my birthday, with a cartoon of a clock buying a train ticket. I wanted a Barbie. She wrote to Emma that “Lucy wants a grown-up figure doll!” More cartoons. Great scorn. The clock arrived, it was a beautiful thing and I used it for years. But what possessed her? When I came home for the holidays I was laying the table, giving myself a dessert fork and butter knife as usual. Oh no, she said, you eat with a proper knife and fork now. (She meant “adult-sized”.) That Christmas they gave me an attaché case – a miniature suitcase. I never got dolls or toys as presents again.

Does this belong here? We were encouraged to throw food wrappers and apple cores from a moving car. Later, friends were very shocked by this. It was as if the world didn’t exist, or didn’t matter. Emma said she used to look out of the car windows and ask herself: “Where’s MY place in all this?”

They tried gracious living on a too-small budget. Couldn’t afford to heat the house, which was too big anyway, so it was always freezing in the winter. Why didn’t we heat one room (apart from the kitchen), put the telly in it, and all live there? We were always being hived off into separate rooms. They were still trying to follow the “nursery wing” model. And Nanny had gone, so they were faced with us as we were, and they had to look after us.

We ate off Georgian silver but they were stingy about butter, sugar, jam, chutney. We only got lemonade/orangeade at birthday parties, when other children had it at every meal. Why didn’t we sell the silver and buy lots of butter? Of course they had to pretend that it was trashy to eat butter or put sugar in your tea or be warm enough! They spent their money on drink and school fees, rather than labour-saving devices.

And there was never any briefing. No “When you’re 12 you’ll be expected to wash and iron your own clothes”. Instead they yelled at me when I didn’t. “You’re so selfish, expecting Mrs Thayer to wash your clothes!” I didn’t know she did. If I left water all over the bathroom floor, I thought it just evaporated. Like the contents of the wastepaper basket that just vanished. I worked out when I was about 16 that they’d expected the schools to tell us anything we needed to know. To do the parenting.

A therapist friend pointed out: “The middle classes want their children to miss out childhood altogether.” What shocks me now is the way they treated us as the adults we would be, rather than the children we were then. They became more rational when the younger two came along. Things changed in the 60s. Other members of the New Poor gladly moved with the times, bought freezers and batch cooked. They ate in the kitchen. They drank coffee out of mugs, not bone china cups and saucers that clattered in your shaking hands. They redid their kitchens in shades of pale blue and bought "oven-to-table" dishes. Our family caught up slowly. Freezers, dishwashers and casseroles changed all our lives, and helped sweep away those finicky table manners that were such a wonderful excuse for prolonged screaming rows. What could they yell about now?

Postscript: At the time, these incidents came out of a clear blue sky, and afterwards I forgot them. This is my attempt to work out what was going through their minds. And explain that nobody taught me about cause and effect.

More here about a privileged upbringing, and links to the rest.

ADHD? Neurosis? Or...

2026-07-02T01:20:50.276-07:00

Someone just posted on Twitter, describing his "ADHD girlfriend". He's taken the post down, so I'll summarise.

She is hurt by a hasty, brief text. Is convinced the relationship is over. This is, according to the poster, "Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria". She seems to "overreact", but that's just her. "Her nervous system has no middle setting." And she feels guilty about "forgetting, cancelling, saying the wrong thing".

Are all deviations from the norm now "ADHD"? In the 70s we'd have called such a person "insecure" or "neurotic" or "oversensitive" or "easily hurt". We'd have said they had "low self-esteem". If this was you, you were supposed to fix yourself. "Grow a thicker skin." "Get therapy."

"Neurosis is an outmoded term for a broad category of mental health issues characterized by chronic emotional distress, anxiety or depression," says Google AI. In the 70s we accused each other of being neurotic all day long. I'm so glad it's outmoded. (See the diagram above: it's an easy guide to what society requires of you.)

The individuals were always talked about in isolation. I wonder why the woman described feels so guilty? When people feel hurt it's usually because others are hurting them, or have hurt them. Never mind the current terminology, be excellent to each other, dudes.

Social Cues and Expectations

2026-04-21T00:45:00.000-07:00

If you've read the fragments of autobiography I've posted here, you'll have worked out that I'm autistic. There's a lot of helpful talk on Twitter among other autists (loathing of fluorescent lights, removal of labels from clothes). But there's also much discussion among the neurotypical – and they know nothing! There's a weird trend for claiming that autists are really GOOD at things they struggle with, or are supposed to struggle with, such as "reading the room" and "being empathetic". Don't trust them.

They've been talking a lot about social "cues" (we're bad at spotting them), without apparently knowing what a "cue" is.

If I, as Puck, say to the Fairy: How now, spirit, whither wander you?
She has to say: Thorough bush, thorough briar...

My line is her cue. But there's no point giving someone a cue if they haven't learned the speech.

The neurotypicals (NTs) often claim that social behaviour is so nuanced that it can't be put into words. They hate being told there are social conventions or rules. This is what I tell them in reply:

I've sometimes found that what I didn't do was quite concrete, and it was perfectly possible for someone to tell me what I should have done.

Me: I never heard again from that nice man I was talking to at the party.
Friend: You do it all as you say goodbye. (I.e. arrange to meet again, swap phone numbers.)

Another story. I'd been in a job three months and was having the interview to see whether they wanted me to stay.

Employer: Your work is fine, we want you to stay but there's just one thing. You don't say "Good morning" when you arrive and "Good night" when you leave.

I did so from then on, wherever I worked. I hadn't known it was a thing. I was about 28.

In another job, a colleague told me off for never saying good morning and good night to the receptionist. I later heard that he thought I was the nicest person in the building.

But you should have seen what I did when they told me to make eye contact... No, not like that.

Remember - the subject that interests most people is themselves. (@DirkBruere had no trouble typing that sentence.)

@thedulab Cardinal social rule is to never make someone feel like an idiot. Perpetually have to assume that everyone is deathly afraid of being perceived in this way. Preempt the interaction by letting them know that stupid questions don't exist. Briefly jest about how they're already in a better position compared to when you were in their shoes. Slip in an anecdote about something embarrassing that happened to you with a level of unreactive casualness that indirectly signals to their brain that it's safe to relax. Chuckle in response to any semblance of an amusing remark. (There, that wasn't so difficult, was it?)

When the delivery man leaves a parcel on my doorstep:

Thanks!
You're welcome!

It's a ritual. It's a script. It is very easy to describe in words – I just did.

And have you heard parents trying to browbeat their children into saying "Please, thank you and 'May I'"? They have no trouble putting these social conventions into words.

As I type on June 4, 2026, Morning Live is giving a script for getting a better mobile phone deal. "Is that the best you can do?" "I'm looking at other offers, I'll have to think about it." They suggest writing the script down on a notebook next to the phone. They're having no trouble telling viewers what to do in this situation. Write a script, and even read it out! Not subtle, nuanced or indescribable in the slightest!

Underrated life skill: Learn to introduce yourself well. Look people in the eye, speak clearly, say something you’re excited about, and give a specific reason you’re glad to meet them. The first 10 seconds set the tone for everything after. Such a simple way to stand out. (@blakeaburge)

One problem I had was that I took literally the platitudes that are handed out to every child:

Be yourself.
Be sincere.
Live in the moment.
Never think about what others are thinking about you (sometimes they add "Because they aren't.")
Never think about what impression you're making.
Don't copy other people. Be original.
Always tell the truth.
Be fair.
Treat everybody the same.
Never think that people don't like you.
They tease you because they like you.
Don't wait to be invited.

Try living by those precepts! It's hard. In fact it's impossible. And everyone around you is doing the opposite. I assumed they meant 100%, 24/7. They meant "about 5%". I was amazed to find people thought about me when I wasn't there. (Try turning the mantras on their heads.)

More social conventions:

Toast must be dark.
Tea must be weak.
Steak must be almost raw.
Lawns must be mown.
Luggage must be smart.
Women must cook.
Everyone must drive.

There, that wasn't hard, was it?

The NTs know we have "literal, logical" minds. But their minds are not literal: they don't really know what those words mean. And now they are wringing their hands over us, assuming our behaviour is deliberate and that we could just not do it. Listen to us - don't listen to them.

Autism is a personality type – it's also a culture. There's an "autistic awareness" day for other people to become "aware" of us. But we don't have a day of our own. Where's our flag? Where's our parade!?

More autobiography here.

Décor Crimes Again

2025-04-21T04:39:00.000-07:00

Flock wallpaper. Once common in Indian restaurants in the 60s and 70s, via Georgian design based on Indian textiles. Probably coming back – in fact it is now extremely upmarket.

Covers for anything that doesn’t need a cover: matchboxes, tissue boxes, toilet rolls, telephones. (Tissue box covers were made of furnishing fabric with passementerie edging to match your bedroom. Phones and toilet rolls were camouflaged by crinoline ladies.)

In bathrooms, themes are out, eclectic is in. If you want to sell your house, put away personal items and cleaning products. Get rid of shells, and soap in the shape of fish. Nobody will buy a house with a medicine cabinet in the bathroom – replace it with a mirror. Have hooks for your towels, not a bar or towel rail. Stick to one bathmat – and hang it up. (Getpocket.com)

White-painted, vaguely 18th century furniture, especially the wardrobe/night table combo that goes over the head of a double bed. Likewise the stick-on white “regency” fire surround framing nothing but a faux marble slab.

Themes: Interior decorators (and customers) use themes rather than reconstructions of past styles (about which they know nothing). If not themes they’re concepts as in “contemporary living concept”. Amanda Lamb gives a room “the Scottish retreat feel”. She also gives a room “New England style”, which seems to mean pale blue paint and wallpaper of weathered planks. The house has dark 70s doors with bumpy glass that now look all wrong.

Age it up: In the 50s, it was naff to make your genuine cottage look more “ye olde” than it really was. Painted horseshoes nailed to the door, a porch made of trellis with a climbing rose trained over it, coach lamps with electric bulbs, brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece. Wrought-iron house sign with a figure of a person ploughing with a team of shire horses.

In the 70s, Upwards bought country cottages and opened up the fireplaces, restored the old bread ovens and bragged about retaining the copper (copper basin with a fire under it for washing clothes). They lit huge logs and filled the room with smoke.

Modernise a 30s house: Remove the pebbledash (and the decorative pebbledash/brick contrast), paint the exterior white, replace the window frames, stick on a porch in the wrong style and tarmac over the front garden. Rip out interior panelling. Replace Crittall windows. (Are those features "dated" – rip'em out – or "original" and worth preserving?)

Thebackstore.com explains popular home décor themes.

Traditional: white tongue-and-groove, a vase full of wooden spoons, an enamel coffee pot. Inspired by 18th century French and English, colours from country flowers. Oil paintings and matching furniture sets.

Mid-century modern: neutral colours plus olive and orange. (Add sculptures of Siamese cats.)

Industrial: Minimalist, exposed brick, copper, rusty steel. Reused stools, workbenches, filing cabinets, hanging lights – anything metal. (Old school furniture fits in here.)

Bohemian: Hippie and Moroccan, embroidery, different patterns, macramé, cushions, house plants. (Hasn’t changed much since the days of Oscar Wilde – try adding pampas grass in a Ming vase and gold-tooled hardbacks for a fin de siècle look.)

Coastal/cottage: Navy, white, off-white. Shells, pebbles, jute mats, rope, stripes, driftwood. (Bunting! Lifebelts! Deck-chair canvas! Paintings of sailing boats!)

Zen/Asian: Minimal, colourful accents: red, purple, gold. Main palette is “natural”. Potted bamboo, indoor water feature. (Add paper lanterns, low tables and sliding room dividers – and a sliding door to your Zen garden.)

Contemporary: Very minimal, no frills, no ruffles, no embellishments. Light colours. White sofa, a few bright cushions. (No art, no sculpture, no character. No books!)

Vintage/Shabby chic: “distressed” furniture, pastel colours, recycled fabric. (Fraying quilts, seersucker tablecloths, faded chintz loose covers.)

Rustic/country: recycled wood, leather, plaid, darker colours. (Copper pans fit in here.)

Here’s another: fresh-traditional with a Florida twist (Looks more late 19th century Aesthetic movement to me, lots of blue and white ginger jars.)

More here, and links to the rest.

Class and Moray Dalton: There's Death in the Cup

2025-01-09T03:31:00.000-08:00

Moray Dalton (Katherine Renoir) wrote several mystery-thrillers that deserve more fans. They are very revealing about attitudes of the time. Other books include acrobats and failing private zoos, but this one is firmly placed in a stuffy little seaside town. The Armour family are beyond the pale of society. Though they have a big house and servants, the other middle class residents do not mix with them. The patriarch's second wife ran off with a French teacher, you see.

“What’s their social status?”
“Oh, middle class, I suppose. The father was a retired manufacturer from the Midlands. But they weren’t visited."
"One does not want to be censorious and Pharisaical, but they weren’t the sort of people we’re used to."

Mark Armour, our hero, is under a cloud for forging a cheque at school. He joined up and had a good war, but when peace broke out couldn't find a job. So he parlayed his startling good looks into a career as a gigolo. We get just a glimpse of this life in the first chapter.

He is forced to return home, where his bossy older sister Bertha inherited all the money. His half-siblings need looking after. George is clearly autistic, sympathetically portrayed, and is happy cutting pictures out of magazines. Winnie is "man mad". She was never very stable and is now about 40. As we've seen from other novels of the same vintage, there was a general idea that if a woman didn't get married she would start to go barmy by the age of about 30.

"One of the sisters is odd. Peculiar in her dress and so forth."
“There’s a taint of insanity then?”

As well as sewing finery out of old clothes, Winnie stalks the local doctor, sitting and crying on the kerb outside his house.

Yes, this is an other stiflingly inturned family, where everyone is forced to dance to Bertha's tune. If she dies, the inheritance is split between Winnie, Mark, George and Claire - the other child of the absconding French wife.

Mark has somehow met and fallen in love with Lucy, only child of what could be another repressive family unit. "I suppose you’ve seen to it that she met any eligibles that happen to be about?” asks her uncle, one of the subsidiary detectives. Oh no, woofles her father, coming up with some feeble excuse. "Lucy is a home bird" – the same phrase used by Joanna Cannan about the pathetic Nancy in They Rang Up the Police.

More about class: a servant going to give "evidence" to the police "was rather too smartly dressed in a bright blue coat lavishly trimmed with cheap fur, opening over a blue silk frock and ropes of pearls." And someone puts on "her high, affected company voice".

Though we barely leave the snobbish little resort, and nothing very dramatic happens (there isn't even a dispute about the will), it is a gripping read. Dalton is a good writer:

It was pitch dark in the drive and silent but for the crunching of the loose gravel under their feet and the steady drip drip of the rain on the laurels.

The car roared through the darkness. The hedgerows streamed by, every twig and blade of grass flashing out in the white glare of the headlights for a fraction of time to sink back again into the peaceful obscurity of the November night when they had passed.

I guessed the killer, mainly because they are the last person standing.

More Golden Age snobbery here, and links to the rest.

Class and Joanna Cannan III: They Rang Up the Police

2024-12-31T06:08:00.000-08:00

Toby frill

You might think this is one of the limpest titles ever, but for the Cathcarts it's not a simple proceeding. One of a family of spinster sisters goes missing, and they eventually call in the law. "After all, I know the Chief Constable."

Before this happens, we peer into the inside workings of one of the most toxic families ever put on the page. Three "girls" and their helpless mother barely see outsiders, and constantly call each other "darling". The youngest, Nancy (38), is addressed as "baby". They have nothing whatever to do (large staff of servants), and don't think this odd. Nancy passes the time sewing. Sheila (red-headed and plain) plays the piano or just sits about. Delia runs the show, and also has some equestrian skills and is part of the local horsy world. Resemblance to the Borden family purely coincidental?

It's Delia who goes missing. Guy Northeast of the Yard is called in, and the middle of the book sags as he goes about his investigation. Meanwhile the ladies reveal a lot about the mores of the time (the 30s).

Someone says, mysteriously: "Well off you may be, but you’re only biscuits when all’s said and done.” I wondered if "biscuits" was contemporary slang, but it turns out the Cathcart family made its money selling digestives. (Servants in GAD mysteries tend to talk like Yoda.)

"I don’t believe there is such a thing as an artistic temperament. It’s not temperament, darling; it’s temper.”

The Cathcarts relate: "We decided that we’d keep calm till eleven” – before calling for help about Delia's absence.

It's the author who despises meals such as this: Besides the tea there was a white loaf, half a pound of margarine, a slice of Canadian cheddar, some beetroot swimming in vinegar, a pot of strong tea, a jug of thin milk, a basin of lump sugar, a cold boiled onion, and seven fancy cakes on the table.

“We never leave any of our personal belongings in the bathroom,” said Mrs. Cathcart. “It’s so suburban.”

The rude servant is "a short young man with oily hair that smelled of violets".

"Rather suburban tidiness" is referred to.

"The Cathcarts were biscuits, but they’ve been out of it for some time," but "three generations and back to the plow?”

The characters come out with some pop psychology to diagnose the sisters, and in the frame of the book, turn out to be right.

"Can’t get ’usbands yourselves, so you don’t want no one else to. That’s what ’tis." An uppity servant says this directly to Delia, shortly before she vanishes.

"Sex repression," opines another character.

When Sheila meets Northeast, she doesn't answer his questions immediately because "she had been wondering if he were married, if his wife understood him, if he realized that a pretty face isn’t everything."

Delia is dismissed as a "repressed spinster, who had practically given up hope of any sex life — an easy prey for any man."

"She may have bottled things up all her life and cracked suddenly.”
"If a silly woman chose to give way to her nerves."
"You know what old maids are, especially at the time when they gives up ’ope."

As for the mysteriously absent Mr Willoughby, "I’ve heard of lots of men with kinks, who just left home for no real reason at all."

One theory is that Delia has run away with Mr Willoughby, who disappeared at the same time. This means Guy has to interview Mrs Willoughby, an irritatingly self-conscious Bohemian who winces at the word "sketching".

I’m too intelligent to worry about something that isn’t. Time isn’t. It only exists for the benefit of the insane majority.

Well, I hung about here thinking how sordid it all was.

“A fruit shop?” “A stall in the market place. I hate smug shops.”

Solicitors are so sordid and everything’s so simple and nothing’s ugly if you just bare your soul.

He was a "typical member of the lower middle class, quite cancerous with respectability".

Eventually, she exits: Of course, it’s been horribly sordid, but it’ll make us more sensitive to beauty, so in a way, you see, it’s been good for our souls. I feel terribly hurt — ugliness does hurt me terribly — and I’m going to rush off now to be healed by flowers and trees and birds.

Clothes are stressed throughout – pay attention.

Delia keeps her hair in order with a hairnet. The cretonnes in the Cathcart's drawing room are "sweet-pea colouring" – mauve, pink and blue. Nancy wears floral fabric.

Mrs Willoughby "wore an orange smock over a black satin skirt, black satin shoes with rubbed toes, and no stockings".

A platinum blonde waitress stepped through a curtain of bamboo and beads.

A peripheral character recalls her own outfit: Scarlet and white checked skirt, scarlet jacket, no hat and white shoes. (Probably marks her as not quite quite.)

Another wore: mauve jumper, mauve halo hat, and gray flannel coat and skirt. (A "coat and skirt" was what we'd call a "suit", but for some reason this word was taboo for women.)

At the inquest, Gerda Willoughby is "dressed dramatically in black and orange".

Nancy complains to her diary that Delia has accused her of wearing a dress with a "Toby frill" – as worn by Mr Punch's dog. "Whenever I make friends with anybody, she says they are boring or common," she adds.

It's maybe not so great as a mystery, but the snobbery and wit keep one reading. He hoped this wasn’t going to be the sort of case you read about in novels, where the detective knows that the victim couldn’t have been in the music room at the time stated, because so great a musician would never have played Puccini.

More here, and links to the rest.

Class and Barbara Pym's An Unsuitable Attachment

2024-12-27T11:54:00.000-08:00

This novel was rejected by Barbara Pym's publisher, in the early 60s. Perhaps it didn't seem in tune with the times. Pym took it back and reworked parts of it, and it was eventually published after her death, when she'd regained her popularity. However, it seems unfinished. She revealed that she originally made John "much worse", but in her world that might mean that he wore a corduroy suit, or dropped more H's. The romance between John and Ianthe is understated, but what she gives us goes straight to the heart.

John is a former film extra who goes to work in Ianthe's library, where they are overseen by the waspish Mervyn. Ianthe, a spinster in her late 30s, attracts interest from some unlikely men. Mervyn is probably gay, but covets her inherited furniture. Rupert Stonebird thinks Ianthe would look so perfect in his house.

Ianthe inherits some money, and buys a cute little house in a London suburb that has definitely not gentrified - yet. As a clergyman's niece, she is welcome by the local vicar and his wife, Sophia, and cat, Faustina.

Sophia thinks Rupert will do for her jilted sister, who is "modern" in an early 60s fashion, wearing a "beehive" hairdo and sometimes a hat like a yellow tulle soufflé.

Everyone agrees that John is an "unsuitable" partner for Ianthe, and the words suitable/unsuitable pepper the text.

There is a local vet and his sister who act as a Greek chorus. And women tend to wear tweeds.

Lady Selvedge and Mrs Grandison set off to open a bazaar, stopping only to consume a "lunch of Welsh rarebit and trifle" at a café run by gentlewomen. Class is frequently expressed through food: ‘We have come to this,’ her mother used to say, ‘eating frozen vegetables like Americans.’

In about ten years from the date of the novel, feminism happened and girls pretended that marriage and pairing off were about to disappear from the face of the earth. But this idiocy has not happened yet.

Penelope had now reached the age when one starts looking for a husband rather more systematically than one does at nineteen or even at twenty-one.

Matchmaking Sophia probes "to find out without actually asking whether he had a mother, wife, fiancée, or ‘friend’ in the background".

Everyone values Ianthe for her apparent class. Sophia's mother notes her "feather-trimmed hat which had just the right touch of slightly dowdy elegance".

Ianthe goes looking for her retired former colleague Miss Grimes, and finds her living in one room in a house of multiple occupation with many bellpushes by the front door, and a hall laid with "frayed chocolate brown linoleum".

It's Daisy, the vet's sister, who notes the bromides people wheel out when anyone's ill. "Perhaps others didn’t feel they could give in to it as I did.’ ‘No, they felt it their duty to struggle on,’ said Daisy, half to herself.

The gang go on holiday to Italy, and Sophia takes the opportunity to tell Ianthe that there are alternatives to marriage: good works, being a pillar of the Christian community. But, cries Ianthe, "Mustn’t all these things be a second best? Oh, not to God – I know what you’re going to say."

‘Well, some books are destined never to be read,’ said Mervyn. ‘It’s the natural order of things.’ Like the women who are destined never to marry, thought Ianthe, remembering Sophia’s words to her in the gardens at Ravello. There had been something almost cruel in the way she had spoken.

When Ianthe goes so far as to announce her engagement in the Times, Sophia wails: ‘I wanted her to stay as she was, almost as if I’d created her.’

There are other details that nail this book to a time and a place (and publishers never like that unless the time is 1550): Ianthe wears a "white orlon cardigan" over her summer dress and the tourists are delighted to discover "osso buco" and spaghetti, not to mention Tuscan red wine.

Authors are often sold as exemplars of "subtle humour" that presumably has to be mined for. This humour, as well as being unfunny, is usually "mild" or "gentle". Pym's humour really is subtle, and neither mild nor gentle. It's no coincidence that, as so often, anthropologists form a background. Their papers of "jural processes among the Ngumi" don't promise to tell us anything much.

"Meeting people in everyday life in north-west London isn’t quite the same as studying a primitive community in Africa", protests Rupert. But by the end of the book he's joking that his next book is going to be called The Wiles of Nice Women in a Civilised Society. And what is this book if not...?

Sophia is revealed as a manipulative woman who has never loved anybody apart from her horrible cat, with whom she is obsessed. (I see Faustina as a Persian with a cross expression.) However, the whole book seems a little unfinished. Sophia's marriage, the lives of the well-meaning vets, are glossed over, hinted at. Another writer (especially one writing today) would make a meal of them, and underline the significant points. Pym just glances at them. Perhaps that's her cleverness.

More here, and links to the rest.

Happy Christmas and a Merry 2025!

2024-12-19T04:41:00.000-08:00

"Ordinary folk" talk about “making memories”. You do all the hoopla and games so that your children can “make memories”. They also call photographs and videos “memories”.

Lower middle-class Jen Teale makes all her decorations every year out of brown paper and string. She sticks stuff onto ping pong balls with a glue gun.

Morning guys. Yesterday we were wrapping your Christmas decorations created at the “Paint your own handmade porcelain Christmas decorations” workshop at the Note Warehouse. (@martinharmanart)

People's Trust for Endangered Species @PTES: Handmade plastic-free decorations for your Christmas tree! Shop now!

Caro Stow Crat has never heard of glue guns: she gathers greenery, conifer branches and red berries in the family’s private woods and sprays them liberally with gold paint.

Samantha Upward avoids Costa – at this time of the year they play "Christmas music" about bells and frost, sung by Nat King Cole imitators.

Journalists take the opportunity to write about their own damaging drinking habits, as if asking for approval or permission.

A vicar has taken on the tradition of telling children Santa doesn't exist and leaving them all sobbing.

But @ferrispictures wins game, set and match: OMG, it's here far too early. I loathe Christmas for its disgusting commercialism. All greed and unfairness.

The sending of valentines has quite gone out of fashion, except amongst persons of the lower class. (@GirlsOwn quoting the1880s)

@MarcCorbishley asks: Is trifle essential at Christmas? (Not among the best upper sets, Marc.)

Enjoy! And Chag Sameach.

More here, and links to the rest.

Vogue's Book of Etiquette

2024-11-08T14:55:00.000-08:00

What not to wear

Vogue’s Book of Etiquette was published just post World War Two.

All etiquette books start “the old rigid formality of the past has quite gone, but we still need modern manners”. They then go on to guide you through throwing a formal dinner party with ten courses, and explain how to address an Archbishop in a telegram.

But apart from terrifying descriptions of equipping a house with the right kinds of wineglasses, chandeliers, chairs and bath towels, you can find here some of the good sense promised by Clothes in Books.

One of the most egregious form of rudeness is to give an invitation to one person in front of another, who is not included.

In conversation, don’t monologue. Don’t lapse into a language not everyone understands. Don’t leave anyone out. Don’t embark on a difficult topic. Don’t attack religions, nationalities, groups of people. (I think this is what self-help books mean when they say “Don’t generalise”.)

Vogue instructs men to “bow while half-rising from your seat” if they spot a female acquaintance across the room. I’m glad this ungainly pantomime has gone out.

In a public place, a man may help a woman to carry a heavy bag up a flight of stairs, pick up something she’s dropped etc, but must not use this incident to scrape an acquaintance.

Do we still bow? Discreetly, when meeting a monarch. We also nod across crowded rooms, and sometimes bow slightly when shaking hands – but there's no need to go over the top and turn it into a comic performance.

There are rules for single girls who may even (gasp!) live alone. Don’t dine alone with a married man. Avoid being alone with a man, married or not, in his apartment or yours, in his hotel room or yours. Vogue adds: stick to one sherry, and a glass of wine at dinner. Vogue is right about all this, and warns against getting any kind of “reputation”.

Sometimes Vogue really hits the spot. Enjoying a party or dance is a “matter of technique”. If you find yourself without a partner or a prospect of one, and no table of friends to sit with, instead of sitting alone on the sidelines and wishing you were dead – GO HOME! Parents should tell their daughters they can phone to be collected at any time, and should not force them to go to parties unless the girls want to go. How I wish my parents had read these wise words. (And this practical approach is more likely to yield results than getting therapy and "letting your subconscious speak" or any such nonsense.)

“Marriage is the single most important event in a lifetime”, but if it doesn’t work out, it’s the husband who leaves the family home. Vogue assumes that all women get married.

Wear a suit to the interview: nobody “will take on a dull, lifeless, untidy and incoherent prospect, who cares only about getting a job as a practical necessity”.

There’s a section on language that’s very like U and Non-U. “Contact” is barred – instead you should “reach” someone. Well, that explains “reach out”. Sofa is preferred to “settee” or any alternative such as “Davenport”. “Couch” is condemned as a “Gallicism”. (Davenport is from the A.H. Davenport company of 19th century Boston, says the dictionary.) As for pronunciation, avoid “cah-viar” or “ah-qua blue”.

“The procedure of entertaining” sounds unbearably strenuous, but “as always, the process of learning is not an unmitigated delight”. Vogue doesn’t tell you how to speed the parting guest, but gives timings for cocktail parties, dinners etc.

THOU SHALT NOT

The “thou shalt nots” are far more amusing than the stuff about choosing Waterford glass and Rockingham china and French Provincial table settings.

It is not decorous to sing or whistle on the street, less so in a crowded elevator.

Never smoke while dancing.

Women shouldn’t wear hats when entertaining at home.

Rings should never be worn outside a glove.

You don’t want to revolt fellow diners, but don’t be furtive or over-genteel.

Valenciennes lace and Valentine’s Day should not be shortened to “Val”.

Widow’s veils shouldn’t be worn with “bright jewellery or coloured stockings”.

Serve only three types of cocktail. More than this puts an unattractive emphasis on drink.

Banned on the exterior of your house are “would-be Tudor mullioned windows – a very Tea-Shoppe touch”.

Indoors, avoid “tables with long, spindly legs and tops made of glass”.

Fuchsia, lime, turquoise and chartreuse should be eschewed in the country, as shades for writing paper, and for your small daughter’s clothes.

Ladies, do not sport a tricorne hat in the hunting field – unless you’re in France.

More here, and links to the rest.

Classy Jobs

2024-06-10T01:18:00.000-07:00

My upmarket accent means that people have always made assumptions about me. When I left university, I needed a job, any job. It was my ambition to “work in publishing”, which to me meant book publishing. Such jobs seemed to be few, or “like gold dust”, as we used to say. So I applied for secretarial jobs that sounded interesting. Sometimes I got as far as the interview, but when they heard my voice the interview panel would become inexplicably frosty. Why was someone like me trying to take a job away from someone who actually needed one?

Posh people need jobs too. But as well as avoiding “trade”, those "jobs in the arts and publishing" were a way of staying among “those of a similar background” and even finding someone suitable to marry. And they paid less because it was assumed Daddy had bought you a London flat.

Oh, and the real value of having a job in publishing is being able to say "I work in publishing" to strangers you meet at parties. It's like saying "I really am middle class, don't worry". People used to say to me “But YOU can’t be a secretary!”. I thought they meant “you, with your brains”, but it was like confessing to being a parlourmaid.

Sometimes it's what other people want for you. Oh, you're a “nice young girl”? You'd better work in book publishing where you'll “fit in”. It's almost protective. But perhaps they don't want anyone to step out of their niche. Are they subtly indicating "You don't belong here"? Sometimes they want you to fulfil a fairytale they believe about the lives of the “posh”. A man once asked me “Why aren't you married to a barrister and living in Fulham?”. (Because one didn’t ask me to marry him, that’s why.)

I cleverly worked out I couldn’t afford to work in book publishing anyway. Girls who could operate these new-fangled “word processors” were paid £2,000 a year more – and that was a lot in those days. I did a course, applied for a job, got taken on as a temp for a week and stayed for seven years. In publishing! Newsletters, not books.

I once went to a party in Marlborough which was full of women who worked in book publishing. When I told them I worked in magazines they looked at me as if I was something the cat had dragged in. “I love magazines!” I enthused. “What are these magazines you love?” one asked with a sneer. Hadn’t she ever been to WH Smith in the high street? It had a wall of magazines, from Angling Times to The Zookeeper’s Gazette. Perhaps she was too grand to visit Smith’s and had The Lady delivered.

More here, and links to the rest.

Keep Christmas Classy

2023-12-19T02:52:00.000-08:00

It’s OK to celebrate Christmas as long as you refer to it ironically as “rampant capitalist excess”. But how do you use the festival to demonstrate your unique wonderfulness?

It’s Aug 1 2023, and Selfridges have opened a Christmas department and the middle classes are furious. They call Christmas “ecksmess” – because it’s tacky, commercialised and starts too early – and think themselves veritable Noel Cowards.

Presents should only be opened after lunch, doing so first thing in the morning is common as it shows a lack of self control. (@archer_rs. As does starting to drink at 11am.)

Christmas can often involve greed and consumerism, not to mention huge waste in plastic packaging, unwanted gifts and food waste. (Brighton Journal, 2018. "Consumerism" means other people buying the wrong things.)

A Facebook member explains why she doesn't celebrate Mother’s Day: It’s not just a question of feminism, but of refusing homogenisation. In other words, I don’t want to be festive on command. I prefer to be me and choose if this is something to be celebrated. Well, that’s my opinion.

Who are these people who must ‘ring the changes’ at Christmas, ditch the boring old traditions for something new and radical? I wish them a merry one, but it baffles me every year. I flinch a bit at design-conscious householders who buy a new set of tree decorations every year (‘our theme is silver and burnt-orange for 2019’ etc). Whaaaaat? No old, scratched family baubles? No wonky toilet-roll angel? Do you not value the past, with all its flawed, naff decisions? (Libby Purves, Mail 2020)

Other people’s Christmas traditions are duller than their dreams, says Caro Stow-Crat. And they’re always accusing each other of “ruining” Christmas.

Middle-class Upwards would never go on a cheap “break” to a European Christmas market. They started out as an independent, tasteful, handmade alternative to those awful shops with their mass-produced goods, but despite their picturesque atmosphere they’re just as tacky and exploitative. (If you want handmade cribs and baubles, try Etsy – but avoid T shirts with Nazi symbols and death threats aimed at rival political blocs.)

Every year, Upwards moan about what Hell it all is, while magazines and TV programmes tell us how to do the whole thing ourselves in the most ridiculously time-consuming way – embroider your own gift tags! Gather green branches and twigs. Make all your decorations, and a wreath for the front door. Bake your own mince pies, cake and pudding.

This year (2023) the Holier than Thou prize goes to the woman who claims “the best Christmas present is no present”, is not giving anything to any of her family, and claims “my five-year-old is on board”. The original Puritans banned Christmas as pagan. This female is afraid her children will want items that are common, vulgar, flashy and plastic. Plus she’s really, really mean.

So Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly, Rock Around the Christmas Tree, Let It Snow – Santa Claus is Coming to Town!

More here, and links to the rest.

Choose Your Words Carefully 13: Accents

2023-06-01T09:52:00.003-07:00

It's those little things that place you – and drive the other classes mad.

Model Katie Price (pictured) once explained “I had my Botox done” before travelling to the States. Some refer to “my atheism” and “my power walking”, and others cringe.

Adding a Y to words that don’t need them (acidy) is very lower-middle-class – they love baby talk.

It’s very middle-middle to pronounce “non” as “nun” as in non-revealing, non-permeable, non-poisonous. Have these speakers been warned not to rhyme “none, one” with “con, don, gone, John, yon” because that’s northern?

Cornices, niches, pilasters: The middle-middles refer to the architectural features as cor-nieces and neeshes, while those higher up the ladder say “CORniss” and “nitch”. Elderly Upwards say PILaster, while most others say pil-ASS-ter or pil-ARS-ter.

What do you call retirement? Lower-middle-class Jen Teale is looking forward to her “sunset years” and plans to go on a cruise to see the world. Like Jen, middle-middle Howard and Eileen Weybridges call it "retyement", and get involved in a lot of committees and work almost as hard as they did when employed. Their upper-middle friend Samantha calls it "re-tyer-ment" and plans to take up painting in watercolours. Aristocratic Caroline and Harry call it "retahment" but will keep an eye on their estate until they drop. Working-class Mr Definitely is going to project-manage his property portfolio, and Mrs D carries on as a school dinner lady for the social side.

Caro's mother still says plarstic, mar-sterbate and car-stration.

Howard says ocktion for auction, "We are going to haf to do", and "should have bin". He also says aquottic and quawk for aquatic and Quark. Samantha rhymes them with attic and park. She says "St John's wort" like "bird thou never wert". It's a plant not a skin blemish.

Teales never grasped that "a double consonant shortens the preceding vowel", and pronounce ogle as oggle. No wonder nobody could spell "millennium".

To everyone but Samantha, Memorex tape was always Mem’rex, and Corsodyl and Voltarol are Cors’dyl and Volt’rol. She pronounces every I in invisibility.

People on Twitter complain about others saying pitcher for picture, and heighth for height. Jen pronounces length as lenth.

At general election time, Sam and Caro flinch as announcers talk about “candy-dates” and “Conservative Hell” areas. If you want to sound posh, clip the vowels (“candid’t”), but pronounce the consonants (Conservative-held).

Old-fashioned English speakers used to insist combat was pronounced “cumb’t”, and shouldn’t be made to rhyme with wombat. Lamb’s Conduit Street in central London was “Lamb’s Cundit Street”. They would explain that if you wrote “cumbat” in medieval Gothic script, it would be unreadable, so an “o” was substituted for the "u". They used to argue about how to pronounce “controversy”, too. Accent on the first or second syllable? I can’t remember which was “correct”. Some pronounce comrade, Coventry, Sompting with a U sound.

They would also sneer if you said “paytent” instead of “pattent” with a short A for patent.

My parents’ shibboleths were sumpthing, everyb’dy and poor pronounced paw. It’s “something, every-body and poo-er”. The distinction between “poor” and “paw” disappeared some time during the 50s and I don’t think I ever heard anyone say “poo-er”, not even my parents. They also used to insist that lunch was “really” luncheon. That didn’t last either.

Whatever you do, don’t call Paris “Paree” in front of an upper-middle-class Upward who speaks French. They will say “Actually it’s ‘Parrrggghhhheee’”, and make you repeat it and repeat it, criticising you every time. “No, you haven’t quite got it.”

“Nobody can ever place my accent.” People like to claim that their accent is a hybrid, the result of moving around the country or continent.

I grew up with Dad from Portsmouth, a very middle-class RP but with a Hampshire burr that you don't really hear so much these days, and Mum had a cockney accent upbringing but has spent my whole life correcting me haphazardly, badly and punitively, in some sort of misguided effort to eradicate all trace of anything, so Christ alone knows what I’m left with. I think I swing from polite RP to South London, which means some people think I'm a Mockney, but I genuinely have no idea I’m doing it unless someone points it out. (MLR. RP with a Hampshire burr would not be RP. You could never make a film set in Portsmouth because if the actors got the accent right nobody would believe it.)

A lot of [public-school boys], I noticed, have a special ‘cleaning lady voice’ which is this slightly flirty, old school charming way of talking to people they regard as underlings or inferiors. (@KatyFBrand)

Gideon Upward puts on a slight mockney accent in the same circumstances, and is rather hearty. Someone described my grandmother as being friendly to cleaning ladies but always “de haut en bas” (from high to low).

Accents are called “broad, thick, heavy, flat”. The long A in path and grass is thought to be “posh”. (It’s just southern.)

My grandparents, who, like me, speak in a Wearside accent/dialect, do this with my wife, who speaks in a not remotely posh Norf London/S. Herts accent. My nana is like "Eeee, don't she talk lovely?" (@bartramsgob)

A character in EF Benson's Autumn Sowing rises in society until she’s invited to dinner by the local titled couple. She puts on an affected, high-pitched voice and is rude to the servants.

In South London, boys avoid a kicking by adopting a Cockney accent, while girls get ahead by sounding genteel. (Via David Bennun)

The upper middles used to hold entire conversations in “Cockney” or “Liverpudlian”. I hope this “joke” has been quietly dropped. But apparently when Americans want to be funny or ironic they adopt a “British” accent – even a “Cockney” accent! They must sound as terrible as middle-class Brits doing the same thing.

I love comedian Paula Poundstone’s remark about her recent visit to England. She said the most astounding part of her trip was how everyone there managed to keep up their accents 24 hours a day. (slate.com)

People sometimes call Received Pronunciation “affected”, as if nobody could speak like that naturally. But perhaps this is because they have been taught elocution, and are mortified to meet someone who really talks posh. In the 80s a friend was puzzled that a university receptionist had not lost her Southampton accent. Other acquaintances thought I was putting on my voice, or had learned it at my “good” school.

Some people even think that my accent is "put on" or think that I'm "trying to be posh" because apparently "your accent is just too posh to be genuine", says a fellow sufferer on Quora.

Class is dead, long live class.

More here, and links to the rest.

Choose Your Words Carefully 12: Usage

2023-05-30T07:14:00.005-07:00

Nobody ever said “Okay yah”. This parody of posh kids arose in the 80s – originating with impressionist Tracey Ullman. Why would you say “Okay yah”? Both "OK" and "yah" mean "yes" – nothing to do with "yah boo" (see picture of Harry Enfield as Time Nice-but-Dim). When I left school in the 60s I noticed that nobody on the outside said “yah” for “yes”, so I adopted “yes” instead.

Before smartphones and the internet, office workers used to hold long private conversations. I know many monologuers, and I used to sit there saying “Yes... yes... yes...”. When I put the phone down, my colleagues would laugh at me.

I had a flatmate who was furious that I said “absolutely” or “precisely” as an alternative. I explained that I wouldn’t say “exactly” unless what someone said was an exact fit with the truth. He became even more infuriated. Sometimes I would say “Mmmm” for “yes” and he complained that I sounded as if I was sneering, like Jeremy Paxman. What should I have been saying instead? How about “riiiiight” or “yeah” or even “yeah, right”? Or "definitely", like the Cs and Ds? I should have tried it.

“Fast” is grander than “quick”. Upwards talk about fast cars, not quick cars, though they say “That was quick!” or “Be as quick as you can”.

Upwards and Stow Crats used to address the lower orders as “my good man”. A man could call an equal “my good man” or “my dear man” during a debate, but it was very patronising. “My good woman” was likewise someone lower down the scale being thick or obstructive. Children could be addressed as “old dear” if they were too precocious or uppity. (Ooh, that stung!)

Caro Stow Crat opines: We never called them “chicks”, they were nestlings or baby birds. From nestlings they became fledglings. “Chick” is baby talk. And we didn’t call them “chickens” – they were hens. They only became chickens post mortem. And I wish that people wouldn’t refer to their cats and dogs as their “babies”. But I can’t stand ‘doggies’ either. Or doggos or puppers. Or still worse, pooches.

What do you call comfortable, rubber-soled canvas lace-ups? From the top down:

Plimsolls or daps
deck shoes

plimsoles or plimpsoles (They were Plimsolls after the inventor of the Plimsoll line. The reason is lost in the mists of time.)

sneakers
trainers

And the room you move to after dinner?

drawing room
living room
sitting room, lounge
front room

As Samantha Upward says, “Only airports have lounges”.

Caro asks: We used to make clothes out of “material”, now I have to remember to say “fabric”. Why don’t we call it “clorth”? (Princess Margaret insisted on "stuff".)

What do you call that thing you can't think of the name for?

doobry or doobery
doofer, thingummybob
oojamaflip

When swimming, you wear a:

cozzy, bathers
swimsuit

Teales wore a "bathing sewt".

The upper layers despise "dip" for "swim" – baby talk again – but a swimsuit is a cozzy and on your birthday you get some nice prezzies. (They even talk about getting "wetty" in the rain, and a restaurant being "a touch spendy".)

“Crayon” is Teale – Upwards talk about “coloured pencils”. “Crayon” used to be printed on the packet – no wonder Upwards couldn’t say it. Still less could they talk about "crayoning". "Colouring in", please. See also “washing-up machine” for “dishwasher” and “kitchen-dining room” for “kitchen-diner” because "diner" is American.

According to Sathnam Sangera in the Times Dec 2020, the official name for the bin where you store your food waste for recycling is “compost caddy”. His friends suggested “peely bin”, “stinky bin” and “the Farage” – typical Upward whimsicality and failed attempts at humour. He knows one Stow-Crat who calls it a “slop bucket”, its genuine wartime name. Back then it contained potato peelings to be fed to your pig, though a slop bucket originally removed the contents of your chamber pot, along with your dirty washing water. During WWII and after, the same lidded enamel buckets were used.

Upwards don’t use “poor” for “deficient”, unless something is “pretty poor!”, or “a poor show”. They’d avoid a euphemism and say “bad”, “unsatisfactory” or “inadequate”. The thesaurus suggests “disappointing” (litotes, and hence acceptable to the upper layers), “substandard” (Weybridge), and “unacceptable” (rather Teale).

Upwards don’t use synecdoche, or is it metonymy: they say “carrier bag” rather than “carrier”, and avoid the naff “tote” or “clutch”. Fashion writers are fond of this figure of speech (a “trench” is something you wear, not a battle line). And the "fibre" promised for your neighbourhood is not All Bran.

“Ta muchly!” for thankyou goes with “May blessings be conferred upon you!” when someone sneezes. "Prior to", "similarly", "initially" and "overly" are also very Middle Middle. It’s very Teale to say “warm” for “hot”, as in weather. (“Very warm today, isn’t it?”) To Upwards, a warm day is pleasant, a hot day is a bit much. (Teales also used to say “I’m a chilly mortal”. Stow Crats stick to hot and cold though they may admit to being "boiling" or “frozen”.)

October 2020: People are moaning that others have suddenly started saying “floor” for “ground” and it makes them want to scream. (They’ve been doing it for the whole of my life, and saying "Pick it up of off the floor!"

Patrick Hamilton in Slaves of Solitude says that a “common woman” is likely to say: ‘Sorry, I’m sure’, or ‘Sorry, but there you are’, or ‘Sorry, but what do you expect nowadays?’ It became “Well, there you go”, or “Well, this is it.” Grander ladies used to say "Life's like that" in a funny voice (Lafe’s lake thet), but I've never found out why.

"It's an aeroplane, not a plane – that's a thing for working wood!” says an ex-RAF pilot. Some flinch at "grand-kids”, explaining that “They’re not baby goats!” And the great John Peel used to say that a ''workshop" is a venue for carpentry.

Caro’s mother is probably the last woman in England who calls an ATM “the hole in the wall”.

A friend says that at home in Devon the worst language allowed was “Bunny Rabbits!” Once grown up, she said “Damn!” one day and her mother slapped her. (Programmes get given a parental warning because Brian Cox says “b*ll*cks” once. I’m sure it’s snobbery.)

Lower-middle-class Teales don't like to make others uncomfortable by using foreign words, so they call the Asian mammals “panda bears”. The South American vegetables are “avocado pears”. They make salads or casseroles from “tuna fish” and "penne pasta". On the side is a "ciabatta roll" or a piece of "French stick". They're lucky it doesn't give them a "mygraine headache".

Class is dead, long live class.

More here, and links to the rest.

Choose Your Words Carefully: 11 (in Quotes)

2023-05-15T10:44:00.002-07:00

My voice marks me out as too embarrassingly middle-class to ever be welcomed into the lefty fold, but as a grammar school then sixth form drop out I'm sneered at by actual poshos. (Writer and women's rights activist Jo Bartosch)

In South London, boys avoid a kicking by adopting a Cockney accent, while girls get ahead by sounding genteel. (Via David Bennun)

I automatically get annoyed when I’m on holiday and I hear an American accent coming from somewhere. I just know I’m about to hear some nonsense. (@LazarusKumi)

Scottish students at Edinburgh University are treated like outsiders because of their accents and comparative lack of wealth, a campaign group has claimed. (@magnusllewellin 2023-03-09)

My grandparents, who, like me, speak in a Wearside accent/dialect, do this with my wife, who speaks in a not remotely posh Norf London/S. Herts accent. My nana is like "Eeee, doesn't she talk lovely?" (@bartramsgob)

A lot of [public-school boys], I noticed, have a special "cleaning lady voice" which is this slightly flirty, old school charming way of talking to people they regard as underlings or inferiors. (@KatyFBrand)

In 2020, France made accent discrimination, or “glottophobie” a crime. During the debate, “parliamentarians complained that many broadcasters with strong regional accents were pigeonholed into reporting on rugby matches or delivering the weather”. (Guardian)

Listening to Angela Rayner on the Today Programme. If she ever had an English teacher he or she should be ashamed. Just imagine this person representing my country on the international stage. (@prodworthy. Translation: Angela Rayner has a northern accent. And now there’s a big fuss about Rayner going to the opera at Glyndebourne – I was called “precious” on Twitter for not agreeing that she is “common”.)

People would prefer to be represented by a barrister with a posh voice, and think that lawyers with a regional accent sound less intelligent or professional, research from @TrentUni and @DMULawSchool shows – in @thetimes (@legalhackette)

One senior barrister recalled being told by a judge that if the lawyer wanted to practise at the Chancery Bar – where property, commercial and banking disputes dominate – “you will have to lose your Yorkshire accent”. Another barrister said their accent stood out so much that they moved back to the north of England... [One barrister’s] ambition was fuelled by being told: “People like you don’t become barristers.” (Times)

One Black Country student said his voice was mimicked whenever he spoke. Others said they were hesitant to speak up in class or ask questions. A student from Lancashire was told his voice was uneducated and aggressive. Another from the same area, who was ostracised by wealthier classmates, was asked if his family worked in coal mines or he grew up in a council house... Someone I had just met once asked me whether my home town was one of those desolate wastelands where the factories used to be. (Times)

A study has found that people from some parts of the country are significantly more likely to be mocked or singled out because of the way they speak. The standard received pronunciation accent, French-accented English, and “national” standard varieties (Scottish, American, Irish) were all ranked highly in the Sutton Trust’s Speaking Up report, but accents associated with Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and ethnic minority accents, such as Afro-Caribbean and Indian, “tend to be the lowest ranked”, said Sky News. (The Week)

Almost half of UK workers have had their accents mocked, criticised or singled out in a social setting, a survey suggests. Researchers found 46% of workers have faced jibes about their accents, with 25% reporting jokes at work. An entrenched "hierarchy of accent" caused social anxiety throughout some people's lives, the report concluded. They said those with northern English or Midlands accents were more likely to worry about the way they spoke. Many of those who were mocked for the way they spoke admitted anxiety over their future career prospects because of perceived prejudiced attitudes, said the research... funded by Sutton Trust. (bbc.co.uk on the Accent Bias in Britain project)

A team of researchers at Northumbria University said that “accentism” causes “profound” social, economic, and educational harm for those with “denigrated accents” in the UK. There is a push to make accents a protected characteristic under the Equality Act after a government commission found that some civil servants feel compelled to disguise their accents at work. Dr Robert McKenzie, a social linguist who led the project, said “accentism” is “alive and well” in Britain, with most people often unaware of their “deeply embedded implicit biases”. He added that students with northern accents were less likely to secure spots at Russell Group universities while people with “denigrated or low in status accents” were more likely to be found guilty of a crime in court. (Times 2022-06-14. The report is called (Speaking of Prejudice.)

Twitter users disparage:
Misuse of ‘yourself/myself’.

Brits refusing to even try to speak other languages when abroad,

“Go shop”, “go toilet” etc.

Pronouncing the L in almond.

A thousand pound instead of pounds.

Saying “pitcher” for picture and “heighth” for height.

More here, and links to the rest.

You Are What You Eat: 18

2023-05-12T09:59:00.000-07:00

In the 90s, I got told off for eating an Eccles cake (flaky pastry and raisins) – too stodgy, and available in packets from a corner shop. But isn’t this the kind of regional cookery we should be celebrating? Unfortunately it's a cliché that the English middle classes will eat peasant food from other cultures (polenta) but not from their own (Bedfordshire clangers, Staffordshire oatcakes).

At home, we never had Christmas cake, just Christmas pudding. And we never had a chocolate log with a papier-maché robin on the top (with wire legs). We ate slices in friends’ houses and it was delicious. Too nice, and might have encouraged us to develop a “sweet tooth”.

In the 80s, cookery writer and broadcaster Delia Smith was looked down on because she “used butter”. Was it by this time “bad for you”? Margarine was sold as a “spread” with positive health benefits.

In the 70s and 80s, friends and flatmates were shocked that I shopped in corner shops rather than supermarkets. “But it’s much more expensive!” (There might have been a penny or two difference – but offset that against the cost of the bus fare to the supermarket.) Sometimes I shopped at the cheap supermarket Londis and they shuddered at the sight of the carrier bags. Didn’t I understand that People Like Us only shop at Sainsburys? You couldn’t get middle-class food in a corner shop, but you could get common tinned sweetcorn and frozen fish fingers.

Soft, sweet white bread used to be reserved for the upper classes. Making it was complicated, and it was expensive. But then along came the Chorleywood process and the Aerated Bread Company. Postwar came the white sliced loaf: soft, rather sweet and cheap. No wonder my parents were appalled and called Mother’s Pride “Father’s Shame”. And home-made – sorry, “artisanal” – wholemeal bread became the class marker.

Fizzy water comes in different strengths of fizz because everything comes in a “range” (even hot cross buns) and there has to be a version we drink/eat and a version we look down on people for drinking/eating. Sodastreams are back, but Upwards are not allowed to add too many bubbles. Withholding again!

M&S Food's Best Ever Mac & Cheese! With cave-aged Cheddar, Pecorino, Emmenthal and mozzarella, topped with roasted garlic oil and onion ciabatta breadcrumb. Need we say more? (@CostaCoffee. You needn't.)

Little paper chef’s hats for the ends of lamb joints or mutton chops were utterly beyond the pale – but who eats either any more?

Apparently Americans call McDonald’s a “restaurant”, and complain that you can’t get Mexican food in Paris. They come to Europe and moan there’s nowhere to eat because they can't find their familiar fast food chains (Olive Garden etc). They also (genuinely) complain that when you order a salad in the UK you get a few green leaves. They’re thinking of the kind of hearty salad you bring to a pot luck supper in the Southern states: a meal in itself with a basis of macaroni. Educated Americans say “It’s OK to go to Dublin now – there are Thai restaurants”. Caro Stow Crat says “What is a burrito?”

The threat of champagne being opened with a sword, which is the kind of thing I hate. (Kate Flett, The Heart-Shaped Bullet. All restaurant theatre is naff and the worst thing is to be in a party of people who all think it’s wonderful. It's so showy-offy.)

CLASS AND FOOD IN LITERATURE

He drank a little tea, black and silent, that still survived upon an upper shelf. He swallowed some dusty crumbs of cake... They began with a soup square, which Leonard had just dissolved in some hot water. It was followed by the tongue – a freckled cylinder of meat, with a little jelly at the top, and a great deal of yellow fat at the bottom – ending with another square dissolved in water (jelly: pineapple), which Leonard had prepared earlier in the day... Leonard managed to convince his stomach that it was having a nourishing meal. (E.M. Forster, Howards End)

When we studied this book for A Level, this episode puzzled us. It is one of the few scenes where we escape the intellectual Schlegels for more than a moment. Presumably Leonard Bast, the clerk, drinks “black” tea, as opposed to China. Surely he made himself a pot? But “black and silent” and “still survived”? The Basts’ supper consists of instant soup, followed by tinned tongue. The literary middle classes did not eat tinned food, and to them “tinned salmon” was a joke and a class marker – see John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses. I hope the Basts had some bread and butter, at least, to go with it. They wind up with instant pineapple jelly, poor things.

In Josephine Tey’s To Love and Be Wise, the working-class Sergeant Williams urges Inspector Grant to try some home-made pickles. Grant declines, explaining “I have a palate” – which he doesn’t want to spoil. (The rest of the cast fawn on Grant, saying that he doesn’t look like a policeman, but more like a “Service type” or army man.)

Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble! is an ironic 80s cookbook by novelist Alice Thomas Ellis. It tells you how to fake posh food quickly, using cheap, easy ingredients. There is a lot of liquidising. The Cinderella ingredients in your store-cupboard are combined with scrambled eggs and topped with browned grated cheese if your husband brings a colleague home to dinner – no takeaways. The author turns frozen pastry, frozen French beans, eggs and cheese into a flan. Condensed milk baked in its tin in the oven for hours allegedly turns into sticky toffee pudding. We used to discuss this phenomenon, but never dared try the process. Perhaps it was “ein joke”, like the instructions for cooking bacon on an upturned iron.

In one of his mysteries, Verdict of Twelve, Raymond Postgate uses cakes decorated with pink icing and shreds of coconut to indicate the low grade of the teashop where we meet one of the characters. I once took a fellow student for a cup of tea at a favourite café down an alley in Norwich. I ate a cake exactly as Postgate described, and my friend was shocked to the core and even talked about it afterwards. And she probably thought I was well brought-up. Many of my fellow students were appalled that I even went to cafés at all. Postgate went on to found the Good Food Guide. His fictional Dr Holmes drinks wine that “had that revolting taste of sugar, ink, and red pepper that only bad port can achieve”.

An Amazon reader called the book “dated”, citing the way the 12 jurors are described in terms of class. Only the academic is a real “gentleman”. And this is how they describe each other – the salesman is accused of “aping gentility”. None of the jurors bases their verdict on the evidence, but point out that the accused didn’t belong in a big house, having once served in a tobacconist’s shop. "Taking someone out of their class" is disparaged – which brings us back to poor Leonard. ("We tried knowing another class – impossible," say the girls.

More here, and links to the rest.

What to Wear 13

2022-11-26T02:18:00.002-08:00

Upper Upwards wear a lot of cashmere in subtle colours. Samantha Upward buys her jerseys (never a "jumper" or "sweater") from ebay, and sometimes dyes them with Dylon or natural dyes like onion skins, tea and blackberries. The garments are old, and wear through quickly or get eaten by moths, but you can always buy more. You can even cut out squares from the uneaten bits, machine them together and turn them into another garment.

Here’s a list of very upmarket items you didn’t know you needed.

Cashmere wash
Cashmere brush
Yacht varnish
Escargot tongs
Grape scissors
Mink storage closet
Marble polish
Silver champagne trug
Cordless hoover for your yurt
Curry comb for the alpacas

Per the Times, Nov 2022, middle-class parents dress and accessorise their children entirely in “sad beige”. This extends to dolls, toys and even mugs and plates. But as Jilly Cooper points out, “All little girls are lower middle class” (Class, 1975). Aged six, I wanted to wear a tutu all the time, and see-through plastic high heels, and wave a pink plastic miniature umbrella printed with ballerinas. Mum disdained shop-bought fancy dress – she always made ours, without consulting us, so we were forced to wear a humiliating cracker costume instead of what we wanted – something pretty.

Kate Long (@volewriter) is fighting the good fight against small boys’ clothes plastered with dinosaurs and spaceships, while girls’ clothes are pink and decorated with mottos like LOVE or PRINCESS. She’s right to be indignant, but this is also a class thing. Clothes covered in slogans, feathers, rhinestones, pink plastic beads and a unicorn appliqué are naff. But I always wanted organdie, gauze and net. And multiple flounces. And I still want to meet Prince Charming.

Again quoting Jilly Cooper: when working class men go tieless, they spread their shirt collar neatly over the lapels of their jacket. There was a fad a few years ago for middle-class men to lose the ties, but they were awkward and half-hearted about it. They just took the tie off and the shirt collar looked empty and untidy. I think the trend has passed.

Who was Liz Truss's stylist? Women politicians are going for dresses in block colours, rather than suits. It's a uniform: safe but dull, skirts to mid-calf, featuring the kind of drapery over the bust that used to be recommended to large ladies circa 1955. Truss has an hourglass figure, and nobody advised her to adopt the Bessie Braddock armoured corset. But in a short skirt her curtsey would have looked even more uncertain.

Are Fair Isle jumpers a sign of frumpy nerdiness? Aran jumpers probably the same, though they had a moment in the 70s.

Sam buys an outfit for her daughter’s wedding, but shudders at the term “occasion wear”. Middle-class Jen Teale yearns for the days of the coffee lace two-piece – dress with matching coat. Caro Stow-Crat wears a short jacket with a fishtail midi skirt to hide her legs in the photographs.

When Jen takes off her jersey, her T shirt never rises with it, exposing her midriff or still worse, bra. She has just learned and rehearsed a method – she probably tucks the shirt into her waistband. Or perhaps she shucks the arms first, rolls up the body then "pops" the neck over her head.

Sharon Definitely never wears the same designer outfit twice – she buys the garment, tucks in the labels, wears it once and returns it. (Dress hire companies still exist and flourish.)

Don’t tie your jumper or cardigan round your waist, or you’ll look like a child from the council estate – I was told by a girl from the council estate. And pushing up your sleeves "made you look like a washerwoman", said the nuns - especially if you then put your hands on your hips. Folding your arms was out too. (Any gesture that meant your hands touched your body were out – including putting your palms on your thighs when sitting down – these are injunctions that go back to the 18th century.)

Working-class people buy “name brands” to show they can afford them. This means the middle classes shun those brands and buy cheaper generic clothes – or expensive brands that don’t flash their identity. Boden-wearers like to pretend that they spend their entire lives on a deserted white-sand beach.

Caro asks: What happened to “country clothes” and “town clothes”? There was a moment in the 1920s when women could only wear black in town. So if you lived there year-round it would be rather funereal! The answer is that you didn’t live there all year round – you spent most of your time in the country, where you wore tweeds and emphatically no black unless someone had died. There are many restrictive rules about what you can’t wear in the country (high heels, black stockings), but what about the town? It’s full of visitors wearing hiking costume, though there’s still a dress code in the City.

From the 30s to the 50s, ankle-strap shoes were beyond the pale, especially with Cuban heels. But the most vulgar shoes ever are orange plastic kitten-heeled slingbacks with square toes from the mid-60s – worn with a touch of grime on your ankle bone, as Nell Dunn (Up the Junction) observed. Upwards could not wear sexy shoes back then, because they were “bad for your feet”. Probably true.

In the 70s, boots slid down the class ladder (became cheaper and more available), and were adopted by a secretary called Dawn. She had long hair parted in the middle, a vacant smile, a skinny jumper and an A line miniskirt. Her boots only reached mid-calf – Upward girls wore boots that came up to the knee (and were probably more expensive). Of course you needed to be slender and long-legged to pull off the Dawn look. She saved for a month to afford her boots. Upward girls never saved, they just ran up an overdraft.

Hercule Poirot’s patent leather shoes, that he thinks are smart and shiny, mark him out as “not one of us”. Yet he can tell that a client is not really a lady because her shoes are cheap and too new. A lady wears “good” (expensive) shoes but then gets a lot of wear out of them. Before patent leather was invented, the aim was to get black leather shoes and boots as shiny as possible – this took a lot of work. In a big house, a boy was employed to clean the household’s shoes. He was known as the “boots”. In the army, a lot of time was spent (wasted) on “bull” – polishing equipment including boots until everything shone. Shoeshine boys in the streets made a good living. But keeping patent leather shiny took hardly any work. Suddenly shiny black shoes were no longer a “sign” of being able to employ someone to spend hours on your appearance, or of having done the hard work yourself.

Upward women can’t dress too sexily – what they'd call "stereotypically feminine". They may wear a more relaxed version of current clothing – nothing too tight, skirts not too short, makeup discreet, hair not too processed, heels not too high. They aim for a natural, healthy, wholesome, practical look (see the Boden catalogue). When this cuts no ice, they may try too hard, but their tight jeans and exposed cleavage will only garner disapproving looks from their female friends. But at least the “natural look” is preferable to the academic bag lady look – layers of flapping garments that entirely conceal the figure.

In the 70s, pretty girls were referred to as “pre-Raphaelite”. Lank hair, unmade-up face, absence of bra and cheesecloth top were supposed to be deliberately Unsexy, and it was galling when men found these girls attractive. This elfin, waiflike look was only available to the young, small and slight. And these girls didn’t have to be warm, friendly or outgoing, didn’t have to learn one subject of conversation really well, meet people halfway, or make any effort at all. They just had to BE. Lucky things. (Upward advice is always of the "work on yourself" variety – never "get a makeover". That would be far too practical.)

Unlike the British upper middle classes, well-heeled Europeans show off their wealth. They used to wear fur coats, and still sport expensive leather jackets, good handbags with gold chains, well-cut jeans, and leather boots. Their clothes look very new and clean. They go blonde, not grey – honey blonde, since they usually start out with dark hair.

Labour Party leader Michael Foot did not wear a donkey jacket to the memorial service at the Cenotaph, it was an olive green duffel coat without shoulder protectors. Middle England still woofles that he was disrespectful not to wear the establishment uniform of black or navy Crombie overcoat. And as a Labour leader he just would have worn a donkey jacket, the uniform of the Irish navvy, wouldn't he? But so what if he had?

More here, and links to the rest.

What to Wear 12 (In Quotes)

2022-11-24T14:58:00.005-08:00

New winter coat has arrived and I am delighted to officially look like I own a chain of 1970s bingo halls. (@GoldenVision90)

According to Twitter, the following are naff:

Babies or small children with their ears pierced.
Wedding and engagement rings in 9-carat gold.
Massive watches.
Gold jewellery on men.

Deck shoes.
White clothes unless T shirts or shirts.
Clothing with the labels on the outside.
Active wear if not actually exercising.

Ugg boots.
Sweet, sickly perfumes.
Men walking around with their tops off at the first sight of sun.
Any form of clothing with obtrusive logos.

Shoes without socks.
Builder’s bum.
A tartan to which you are not entitled.
Stiletto heels in the country.

Babies dressed as adults, especially in trainers.
Headbands on babies.

Deliberately unbuttoning the first button on the sleeve of your jacket/coat is a sign of a bounder and a cad.

Janice Turner in The Times laments that this is the fifth summer of milkmaid cosplay. (2022-06-16)

The real decline of Western culture is pyjamas becoming outdoor clothing. (@VeteranGamerUK. He’s right – “athleisure” is pyjamas.)

All that money and power, yet the Queen dresses like a dinner lady at a country wedding. (@anon_opin)

The kind of holiday jewellery you would wear with a kaftan, somewhere hot and exotic: a tangle of necklaces or an armful of bracelets. (Jess Cartner Morley in the Guardian, Aug 2021)

I remember a time when everybody in the Liberties was wearing Burberry. Not realising it was, still is, very common. You would never see Burberry in Rathfarnham, Terenure or Rathgar. (@bluredfrank)

A writer-in to Points of View (Sept, 2020) complains that The Repair Shop’s Jay Blades wears a flat cap indoors – in front of ladies!

Does every academic have at least four stripy tops? (@DrMagennis)

Dressing slovenly is a super posh thing. See also driving an old banger. People from normal backgrounds don't have such luxuries. (@Otto_English)

My mother is urging me to have my ring ‘upgraded’ because a respectable American middle-class woman needs a bigger diamond. (Dear Prudie, slate.com)

High fashion dresses have more than a touch of Margot from The Good Life – in evening wine and cheese for the boss mode. (@Amanda_Vickery. Penelope Keith and her dresser used to raid Harrods.)

She had about nine bracelets and bangles, consisting of chains and padlocks, the Major's miniature, and a variety of brass serpents with fiery ruby or tender turquoise eyes, writhing up to her elbow almost, in the most profuse contortions. (William Makepeace Thackeray, A Book of Snobs)

In Hampstead, you must wear sports attire in the morning. Around lunchtime, change into something seasonally appropriate. Gay couples wear matching sunglasses. Gentlemen, if it’s warm then you may wear your jumper over your shoulders like an 80s catalog model. Jeans are acceptable as long as they are accompanied by either a Ralf Lauren Polo shirt or a long-sleeved shirt without a tie. Ladies, long coats in autumnal colours are more than acceptable over either a jersey dress or jeans and a shirt that coordinates with your partner... No matter what the age of your small human their outfit must cost between £50 and £500, no exceptions. If your little human is not appropriately clothed then your family will be marched up to the tube station and sent to Edgware. (Via Facebook, paraphrase. Is this person really talking about Hampstead? Ralf Lauren? Catalog?)

According to Drusilla Beyfus, in Lady Behave, 1956, when entertaining the Queen to lunch, women must wear white gloves. There was a complicated etiquette of when you took the gloves OFF (to eat finger food) and put them back ON... The Queen carried on wearing white gloves, probably because she had to shake a lot of hands. So that’s what she kept in her handbag – a spare pair!

I bought a cheap two-piece suit from the high street, hoping to make a good impression. Ten minutes before we sat down [for the client meeting, my boss] pulled me to the side, wanting to know if I could find anything more ‘relaxed’ for next time: 'the suit is a bit… pompous,' he added. So, at the next meeting, I took his advice. I showed up in the same jumper and chinos I wore clubbing the previous Saturday in the West End. But I felt shabby. 'I look underdressed,' I recall telling him, as the client strolled out in his immaculate navy jacket. And yet that was the point. As a representative of the advertising agency, I was told we couldn't be seen as old-fashioned. (Spectator)

Likewise, a woman worried that her clothes and hair didn’t “read as professional” on a Zoom call.

Her white blouse, fastened at the throat with a brooch depicting a couple of tennis rackets, was sprinkled with various bits of cheap jewellery which her means had permitted her recently to acquire. Under the rackets, a wish-bone, a turquoise horseshoe, and a bedizened safety-pin were followed by a pendant proclaiming that her Christian name began with a P. Westward, a watch hung. To the north east, a silver insect, with amethyst wings, would have been solitary but for a “Chaste design, set with fine quality pearls, at £1 10s.” A yard or two of chain encircling her neck became a loop line on a true-lover’s knot of red enamel before its terminus in a bunch of charms at her waist. (The Position of Peggy Harper by Leonard Merrick, set circa 1900. Like Jacky in Howards End, Peggy is not a lady. But Jacky is always good-humoured, and would never go back on a pal.)

I've told the tale of me wondering why it was that I could go to an exhibition dressed in jeans and no one would look at me, then go in a suit and everyone will talk to you. Then I got to be on a stand and had 20 people around wanting info and I just went straight to the guy in the suit. I've since seen this in academia where the secretary would tell everyone what to do because she dressed smarter than everyone else. And that's when I started to dress smarter as it sets expectations in people. (Matthew Jones)

Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides wrote about a crop-haired girl student who wears self-crafted grey felt clothes and calls herself "Moss". Everybody knows that when she graduates she will grow her hair, put on a blouse and skirt and get an ordinary job, and change her name back to "Susan".

When we met, my girlfriend was finishing up grad school and dressed a little young for our age—clashing or mismatched colours, old and tattered clothing ... just not what a lot of other people our age are wearing... She’s pretty eco-conscious and doesn’t believe in throwing things away... clothing that’s faded and dirty is still a part of her daily wardrobe. (Dear Prudie. Note how students are expected to morph from Bohemian to preppy to office wear. I’m guessing the Bohemian look is just as much a uniform – when you’re 19.)

For some reason that I’ve never fully fathomed, parents in those days always tried to prevent their children wearing grown-up clothes as long as possible. In every family there was a stand-up fight before a boy had his first tall collars or a girl put her hair up. (George Orwell's Coming Up for Air, talking about the years before WWI. Teenage girls wore mid-calf skirts until they were 17 or 18, even though they might be working from the age of 14.)

"She's cleverer than she looks." I've had two exec producers say this about me. Assume it's because I wear makeup and dye my hair. I really hate the pressure to look 'bookish' if you want to be taken seriously. Each to their own, but wearing make-up and nice clothes, and dyeing your hair do not mean you're thick. (@RebeccaRideal )

You know what they tell you – appearance doesn't matter. They lie. You knew that.

More here, and links to the rest.

You Are What You Eat 17

2022-11-11T02:24:00.002-08:00

I love sitting in caffs reading the paper and doing the crossword. In lockdown most closed their doors - would they survive?

I returned to Chapel Market, Islington and found that two of them had re-opened but had gone upmarket. One, that used to be popular and packed, is now a tagine restaurant and almost empty. Perhaps it fills up in the evenings.

Another refurbed its decor and put in a few armchairs and coffee tables, but despite that it is still a proper greasy spoon. The one opposite was unchanged and shabby, but in the past weeks it has acquired new tables, a glossy marble-effect tiled floor and new paint on the walls. Food is improved, but it's still a haven for old people and odds and sods.

In Stoke Newington the Flamingo is now the Floral, with a green wall – of plastic vegetation. Banquettes are chrome yellow and the place seems as busy as ever. Portions are generous.

Lou's in Dalston went too far upmarket, but has now come back down again. They really know how to make a sandwich – with thin white sliced bread fresh out of the plastic wrapping. Sadly the caff on the De Beauvoir Estate is re-opening as an organic veg shop. It was a haven, with a view of 60s tower blocks.

What they all have in common: Turkish cooks, staff and proprietors. Halal sausages are offered, along with falafel wraps, next to paninis, beans on toast and the all-day breakfast. None advertise themselves as Turkish restaurants, however, and they'll never be reviewed in the broadsheets. Meanwhile, visit and enjoy the excellent and inexpensive food.

More pix here.

More here, and links to the rest.

Money-saving Tips for the New Austerity

2022-11-09T15:05:00.012-08:00

In the current economic climate, the girls are deciding which luxuries they can give up.

Samantha Upward: There was a funny piece in one of the papers with a couple arguing about which snacks they would give up.

Caroline Stow-Crat: Good grief, we never had “snacks”!

Sam: Bang would go sixpence.

Caro: Exactly.

Sam: And besides, they were common.

Caro: And vulgar.

Sam: I think we were allowed peanuts in their shells – you had to do a bit of work to get them out, and no nasty salt or chemical flavourings.

Caro: Do you ever eat unshelled peanuts now?

Sam: No. I eat prawn cocktail crisps wherever I can get them. We used to wash and dry pumpkin seeds, too, and shell and eat them. When we didn’t dye them with food dye and string them as necklaces.

Caro: So very not plarstic!

Sam: And people think the middle classes are privileged! Anyway, here's a list of money-saving tips:

Re-use printer paper (print on the back), or give old print-outs to your children to draw on.

Search online for printer ink deals.

Buy something half-price on Black Friday.

Buy pyjama tops and wear them as T shirts – they're cheaper.

Visit charity shops in richer areas like Hampstead and Notting Hill.

Mix and match colours and patterns from your local charity shop.

Buy a copy of Cheap Chic by Caterine Milinaire. (She recommends shopping in the school uniform sections of upmarket department stores for wool jerseys and white shirts. Or try workwear suppliers like Alexandra for plain basics.)

When writer Arthur Marshall was asked by a charity collector what he did with his old clothes, he replied: "I fold them neatly, put them on a chair, and put them on again in the morning." (But I think he lifted the joke from Punch.)

Cook at night when electricity is cheaper.

Reheat cold coffee in the microwave.

Batch cook and freeze.

Use the microwave or a slow cooker. Even a stove-top pressure cooker saves fuel. Likewise a George Foreman grill or air fryer.

Haybox cookery. (Did anyone really do this?)

Take your lunch to work.

Go vegan or vegetarian.

In the supermarket, buy a few things from the “reduced” trolley. Go just before closing time.

Buy the loss leaders – the “tuppence off baked beans this week”.

Forage.

Religion hop – there’s usually a coffee-and-biscuits moment, or even a free meal.

Roam expensive food shops like Selfridges and browse the free samples.

Pick up dropped fruit and veg at the market. Again, just before it closes. Dressing like a bag lady optional.

Grow your own veg. If you don't have a garden, bag a council flowerbed or a bit of grass verge.

Combine pulses: rice, peas, beans. Use tinned or packet soup as a sauce.

Try savoury bread pudding with brown bread and courgettes (fry the veg first).

Pasta/rice, cream cheese, sweet corn and finely chopped onion.

Dip leftover sandwiches or toast in beaten egg and fry.

If growing your own veg, remember beet and turnip tops are edible.

Grow cress on a bit of old flannel. (Update with kitchen paper.)

Collect seeds from your own plants and sow them. (Gather seeds from your friends’ gardens or wherever you go.)

Throw apple cores onto motorway verges and return in 50 years to gather the fruit.

Collect firewood from skips, woods or commons.

Batch buy food such as jam or crackers from Amazon. Co-ordinate with a neighbour and swap half.

Mrs Beeton has recipes for leftovers involving cream, sugar and eggs.

Italian bread, tomato and basil soup is delicious.

Keep bread in the fridge or freezer, not a bread crock or bin. These look charmingly traditional, but the bread will go stale and mouldy.

Save Saturday supplements and use the colourful pages as gift-wrap.

Put ends of soap in the small net bags some products come in. Or crochet your own bag out of string. Use the whole thing as soap. Some say you can grate and boil ends of soap to make new soap bars or shower gel.

What happened to the “freegans” who were going to live on others’ leftovers? Not advisable during a pandemic, and what would happen if everybody did it? But if you do eat out, take home leftovers. Even ends of bread can go in the soup, and the rest can go in a pita or tortilla.

Stay at home! Make your own latte from instant sachets, and make a "store cupboard" lunch.

Once again the middle-classes must resign themselves to being "the new poor" and live the "shabby-genteel" life. Rose Henniker-Heaton, Running a House without Help, has some good tips.

You Are What You Eat 16

2022-11-09T10:05:00.001-08:00

I hate the assumption that working-class people only eat English food, and cheap staples from other cuisines are dismissed as ‘pretentious and posh’ by others. (@STEMlorde) Except that spag bol and lasagne is “caff” food, not café food.

The parents are of the expensive, cocktail-party-and-chromium kind. (Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding, 1948)

M&S Food's Best Ever Mac & Cheese! With cave-aged Cheddar, Pecorino, Emmenthal and mozzarella, topped with roasted garlic oil and onion ciabatta breadcrumb. Need we say more? (@CostaCoffee) There's an upmarket version of everything.

I made home-made pesto and the ingredients cost about £800 and it’s not even that great so my life hack today is go to Lidl and just buy a jar for a quid and don’t be a twat like me. (@JaneSlavin)

The antiquated snobs will tell you you're wrong to say dessert rather than pudding, yet they will not hesitate to ask for a dessert spoon. (@AodhBC)

Latest Upward/Weybridge fad is sneering at anything imported, especially flowers – one must get behind Brexit/save food miles/save the planet.

Teales and Definitelies domesticate foreign tastes by adding sugar: Balsamic vinegar and sweet chilli sauce (that isn’t very hot). They domesticate “artisanal” bread by making a soft version.

Sam Upward would offer you “mashed potatoes”, because “mashed potato” sounds like something you’d read on a menu.

Who was refusing to go to a funeral because the choice of venue for the wake was “Beefeater or Harvester”? (At least you'd get enough to eat instead of a handful of polite nibbles.)

Most layers of the middle class love turning any subject into a rant about obesity (burden on the NHS, wasting our tax dollars). Starve the chavs! (Obesity can be a result of poverty.)

Upwards can never eat anything “creamed”: creamed corn, creamed potatoes. Especially when the word means “smothered in white sauce”.

Dark brown meat in dark brown gravy is very downmarket. It’s hard to find except frozen in Iceland.

"Good food": consists of fresh ingredients, freshly cooked – but not deep fried. It is probably dished up in a style borrowed from a country where you can afford to go on holiday. If you want real British food you’ll have to sign up to meals on wheels from Wiltshire Farm Foods.

Fizzy water comes in different strengths of fizz because everything comes in a “range” and there has to be a version we drink or eat and a version we look down on people for drinking or eating. Sodastreams are back, but Upwards are not allowed to add too many bubbles. Upward withholding again!

Whatever happened to those little paper chef’s hats for the ends of lamb joints or mutton chops? They were utterly beyond the pale in the 70s – but who eats mutton any more? (Damned by John Betjeman: "The frills round the cutlets can wait...")

Until the 50s, jam and pickles were decanted into cut-glass dishes. Only the lower classes put a jar of jam or pickles on the table, whether or not in a saucer or with a special silver jam spoon that hooked over the side. Of course silver jam spoons with a latched hook were utterly naff, as were asparagus tongs. Asparagus, melted butter and all, was eaten in the fingers. Those silver jam spoons come in handy for jars of instant coffee. (The Upwards faint.)

A 30s book of “cookery and household management” describes making, with a lot of time and trouble, a savoury custard which you cut into slices. You then punched shapes out of the slices, washed them in several changes of cold water, and added them to clear soup. The shapes were replaced by small pasta shapes like stelline before disappearing from our lives.

Why are the chairs in trendy upmarket cafés too low, and the tables too high? Makes eating difficult, makes reading difficult. Makes typing on a laptop harder, not easier. Typing chairs need to be high – you need to imitate a piano player, not a begging dog.

Upwards are allowed to like motorway services if they have a gloss of artisanal rusticity – a farm shop, some distressed wood, an absence of videogames and fruit machines, proper coffee. Someone on Twitter describes having a coffee at a services “in the middle of nowhere” as the ultimate in alienation. Very Bohemian Rowena Upward drives to motorway services on purpose to soak it up. Local residents would be outraged to hear that they live “nowhere”. Would paintings of motorway services, or those “strange, sterile” Amazon supermarkets, have a Hopperish feel, asks an architectural journalist?

There’s a tendency for institutions to replace an affordable canteen or café with a very upmarket restaurant which will get reviewed in the broadsheets and attract an impressive clientèle. Meanwhile ordinary visitors have nowhere to eat, avoid the museum/concert hall as a result, and the restaurant goes bust. When firms were no longer obliged by law to provide canteens the concept vanished from our minds. Was the wonderful BHS canteen in Oxford Street the last man standing? Ordinary grub, formica tables, and not a single pepper in anything. The National Gallery, the Portrait Gallery, the V&A – they all had canteens and I remember them fondly.

Why do Upwards despise pickles? Because they need to show that they can afford fresh vegetables, and always have been able to. They also needed to show that they could afford a fridge. This taboo extends to despising anything vinegary apart from French dressing.

Ethelind Fearon in The Reluctant Hostess (50s) describes the dilemma of a woman when a friend unexpectedly drops in to lunch and all you have in the larder is six eggs. Solution: omelette, followed by zabaglione (a trendy 50s dessert of whipped up egg whites, sugar and sherry). Why didn’t she say “there’s nothing in the house, shall we go out?” Because there was nowhere they could go. Somewhere acceptable for two ladies is either too expensive or too far away, and her husband has taken the car. Upwards used to avoid cafés, even dainty tea shoppes, because “bang might go sixpence”. They were right – I’ve saved so much money not sitting in Costa’s for hours. Caffs and Macdonalds are cheaper, but this is fast food, and Upwards can’t be seen there. The tea shoppes were too lower middle class and the crustless sandwiches came with a sprinkle of mustard and cress and a handful of crisps.

When computers arrived in offices about 30 years ago, many Upwards recoiled from them. They all came in beige plastic. There wasn’t an organic, artisanal version. We got used to them, and now they come in sleek, stylish metal. But some Upwards still feel the same way about microwaves, now being recommended as they use less fuel.

I fear I am not the only insufferable microwave snob. A woman I know admits she views microwaves as ‘anti-aspirational’. She reluctantly bought one years ago for £30, still doesn’t know how to use it properly, and only ever heats up porridge inside it. It is hidden from view in a cupboard. Another super-successful woman I work for won’t have one in her house. Her word for them is ‘common’. (Times, Candida Crewe, Aug 2022) And a friend didn’t like to use a microwave because “you have to use plastic dishes”.

Lady Behave by Drusilla Beyfus (1956) reveals a lost world of menu French and salad plates. It's like looking into Tutankhamun's tomb. Salad accompanied a main dish, but on a separate plate. The most naff were glass and crescent-shaped. When laying a table, don’t forget the ashtrays and cigarettes. Beyfus boldly suggests putting dishes of vegetables on the table so that guests can serve themselves. She describes the “cooking hostess” who has to provide a dinner on a grand scale – she no longer has servants, so she just does it all herself. Another thing she doesn’t have is a job. Beyfus frowns on finger bowls, though you are supposed to eat gulls’ eggs in your fingers, shell your own prawns and debone your own sole. The ladies would need to withdraw after that lot – to wash their hands.

Beyfus uses the word “delicacy” frequently. Another striking aspect – the food is all European, meaning French or Italian. German and Swiss food have never been “gourmet” in the UK, apart from Scandinavian smorgasbord, and fondue in the 70s, which we will pass over in silence. There’s a complete absence of anything from the Far East or Indian subcontinent. Delicacies are snails and frogs’ legs, which are either Roman-style decadence or famine food. There’s a lot of garlic, but not a single pepper.

More here, and links to the rest.

Beat the Cold and the Fuel Crisis 7

2022-10-03T07:02:00.008-07:00

And save the planet.

Halogen bulbs are better than LEDs.
Showers, not baths.
Dry your clothes outside, not in the tumble-dryer.

(All from BBC Breakfast)

Dust lightbulbs.
Turn off the heating when you go out.
Office buildings to turn off lights at night.
Leave curtains and blinds open until the sun goes down to take advantage of natural light and warmth.

Don't heat empty rooms: turn off the radiator in the spare room and close the curtains. Keep the door shut, too.

(from The Times)

Tips from Twitter

Things I learned from working in -10°F on loading docks:

Scarves/Keeping your neck warm does a LOT to keep you warm.
Wear 2 pairs of socks & tuck your pants (trousers) in between the layers of socks.
Tuck your sleeves into your gloves.
No hat? Get a long scarf & wrap it like a hijab.

Learn to crochet:

Wrist warmers
Shrugs
Hug-me-tights
Shawls

What to wear:

Corsets
Fine vests and spencers
Waistcoats that hug your ribs
Stockings under trousers
Scarves and snoods
Silk scarves, shirts, vests
Socks on your hands at night
Furry ear warmers (very fashionable in the mid-60s)
Long silk underwear
Fine wool long vest and long-leg knickers. Tuck the vest into the knickers.
Tuck your top into your skirt or trousers.

Fill the bath with hot water and leave the bathroom door open.

Wear a nightcap, don’t drink one.

Slippers and shoes with thick soles – platform shoes keep you off cold pavements and out of the snow.

Old dinner jackets are warm, says @zi6qa. And stylish!

Paper can be used as insulation, says @jaredmshearer. Over or under your vest?

Cardboard insoles make a difference – but commercial insoles are better and sheepskin are best.

Tuck your shirt in. Tuck trousers into socks.

Make mittens by cutting the toes off socks and making a thumb hole. Bind the edges.

Don't throw out that moth-eaten cashmere jumper – cut off the sleeves to use as wrist warmers.

Insulate knitwear with a big plaid shirt over the top – or an emergency poncho. A bin bag with a head hole and arm holes would probably perform the same function. They can also be used as rainwear.

Line hand-knits with taffeta.

Pyjama trousers under jeans, suggests @szetoinsitu.

And change out of damp clothes, says the BBC's Morning Live.

Keep changing your socks. Wear two pairs.

At home, get up and move around every hour.

Instead of turning on the central heating:

Check your fire and carbon monoxide alarms.

DO NOT start a fire in your house unless you have a chimney, warns @OSTBear. He also points out that candles emit heat as well as light.

If the electricity has gone off but you have a gas cooker, keep a pan of water boiling on the stove. (Make sure it doesn’t boil dry.)

Plug in your slow cooker in the living room.

Divide up open-plan rooms with thick drapes, or room dividers. Rebuild that wall you "knocked through". French style glass doors between the rooms will conserve heat while letting in light.

Put a candle in a clay pot and it will radiate heat.

Fool your brain with a “crackling fire” video, says @Lisaffect.

Clip fine blankets to your curtains with clothes pegs, says @thunderratz. Or use beach towel clips intended to clip your towel to your deck chair.

Electric throws are cheaper than heaters [but check for safety!!!!], and space heaters are cheaper than central heating. Heat the person, not the room – or house.

Don’t block radiators with furniture. Stick foil behind radiators and fix a shelf above them to reflect and retain the heat.

Keep internal doors closed. If anyone leaves a door open, shout “Were you born in a barn?” Or "Shut that door!" If you have arches instead of doors, hang curtains or "portieres".

Put rugs down on those fashionable bare boards and laminate floors. (To clean, hang them over a washing line and beat with a carpet beater. Warmer now?)

In a two-storey house, live upstairs (heat rises), or fix up a thick curtain between downstairs and upstairs – or box in the stairs and put a door at the bottom.

Avoid external walls, or insulate them with blankets hung as tapestries. Or bookcases – books do furnish a room. If you have no books, buy in bulk from charity shops. You may even start to read!

Families and flatmates congregate in one room.

Ten pigs give out as much heat as a single-bar fire! Copy Yorkshire farmers and keep cows downstairs. Or take a hint from the Irish and Scots and keep your animals down one end of your bothy. Sleep on a mezzanine floor above them. Or be like the Russians and heat the house with a big porcelain stove on which you all sleep.

Put a screen round the front door.

Hang curtains over all doors.

Bring back the "room divider".

After cooking, leave the oven door open, advises @OllyWrites.

Build a bonfire in the garden with that wood you liberated from skips. You can even cook on it! Sausages in a roasting tin; chestnuts and jacket potatoes in foil, in the embers.

Heat the person, not the space. (Room heaters, electric blankets or even slankets.)

Huddle over a heat source, as your parents and grandparents advised you NOT to do.

Sleeping arrangements:

If you don’t have a hot water bottle or wheat bag, fill a glass lemonade etc bottle with hot water and wrap it in a towel or jumper. Improvise a wheat bag from a sock and some raw rice.

Turn your bed into a four-poster and dress it with a thick tester (roof) and curtains. Use quilted fabric.

If you run out of bedclothes, use bathtowels and coats. If staying in a hotel, demand more blankets than the single one they hide somewhere in the room.

And you can always sleep with all your clothes on. Curling up is warmer than stretching out.

If you have dogs and cats, pile them on your bed.

Share your bed with as many other people as possible – all at the same time.

Pick a high bed, not a divan – or pallet. An old-fashioned valance will insulate the space underneath and obviate cold draughts. Or fill the space with suitcases.

Flannelette sheets and duvet covers keep in the heat. You can have as many duvets as you like and even sleep ON one – or two. Tuck the duvet round you, not under the mattress. Partners – adopt individual duvets.

Put a blanket under your sheet, or on top of your sheet and sleep on it. Put another one between you and the duvet. Layer blankets with newspapers in between.

Invest in a sleeping bag designed for Himalayan expeditions. Wear while working from home and watching TV.

Pitch a tent in your living room, blow up your lilo, don your sleeping bag and crawl inside with your hotwater bottle. Zip up the tent from the inside.

Some recommend putting the tent on your bed and sleeping in it.

Build a Scottish box bed in a corner of the room.

“Blanket forts are great,” says @eveiswurzig. (Made from blankets and clothes rails, or a blanket draped over a table. Mattress on the floor, whole family huddles.)

You can build something similar to work in.

If you lose power, sleep together with your children in the middle and layer blankets over and under everyone, says Lee in Iowa.

During the day:

Wrap yourself in a space blanket as you work.

Insulate your typing chair – throw a coat over the back.

Keep moving. Housework warms you up!

Wrap yourself in a spare duvet.

Make soup – it's also cheap.

Boil water and keep it in a thermos to save boiling the kettle constantly. Or fill the thermos with tea.

Invade the second homes of rich people, suggests @hanikamiya.

Window treatments:

There are many cheap ways of insulating windows – plastic, bubble wrap, cardboard, rubbish bags – but have you thought of using an emergency blanket?

Install blinds as well as curtains and draw both.

Hang thermal curtains.

Install external shutters.

Use a pool noodle cut in half lengthways as a draught excluder, recommends @nivahiem. Or find a 1970s pattern for a draught excluder in the shape of a corduroy dachshund.

Build a broch – an ancient Scottish castle with double walls (see above). Or a beehive hut as dwelt in by the monks of Skellig Michael, an Irish island in the Atlantic.

Already firms are ceasing to heat foyers. Will we go back to the 40W bulb in the hall? The five-inch, tepid bath?

On trains, shut the door after you. They're probably automatic now, but I once spent an entire chilly train journey getting up and shutting the door between carriages as people passed through – and didn't shut the door after them. I also spent a freezing journey wrapped in sheets of newspaper. The Good Old Days!

In a café, pick a seat near the back instead of scowling at thoughtless customers who leave the door open. Sorry to spoil your fun.

More here, and links to the rest.

Beat the Cold and the Fuel Crisis 6

2022-09-23T06:16:00.001-07:00

There's a fuel crisis, and the young think that "no central heating" meant "no heating". Meanwhile oldies reminisce about the beautiful frost flowers on the inside of the window panes. I remember chilblains. Caroline Stow Crat and Samantha Upward share tips.

Caro: We’ve lived through fuel shortages before – the war, the oil crisis. How did we cope?

Sam: We need to reinvent some old technology. In the early 70s oil crisis, you could still get oil lamps and oil from the corner shop! And the papers offered tips on making Roman-style lamps... There are safer versions online and you can buy lengths of wick, and oil lamps and kerosene.

Caro: And Roman replicas... and Indian brass lamps. I remember in 1973 candles sold out pretty sharpish.

Sam: Or you can put out lots of tea lights in glass holders. You can even get battery-powered ones, and candles.

Caro: I could read in bed with a head torch. And dinner parties can be candle-lit.

Sam: In the olden days, you put a water-filled carafe in front of your candle.

Caro: I like those regency mirrors with integral candle holders, same kind of idea.

Sam: And that’s why you had a big mirror over your mantelpiece. Motion-sensitive lights everywhere might help. Kids won't remember to turn lights off – but they might if you tell them it's to save the planet.

Caro: And let’s not revive the paraffin stove. Give me a good old log fire.

Sam: But the pollution! People are ripping out their woodburning stoves.

Caro: There’s always something! You could buy a van and follow tree surgeons around, or go out at night and take waste wood from building sites and skips.

Sam: You can get coffee logs, or one of those devices for making logs out of old newspapers. Perhaps London will turn black again – and be known as The Smoke.

Caro: And Edinburgh as Auld Reekie – reek was smoke, not a pong!

Sam: If turn on the central heating, keep it low, and make sure your radiators have individual controls. So you can have real heat in the living room and gentle warmth everywhere else.

Caro: Room heaters blast hot air into a room – you can then turn them off.

Sam: Put up a screen round the back of your chair, drape a blanket over the top and direct the room heater into it directly. Or move into a house with smaller rooms.

Caro: What about transport? During the war Mother drove a pony and trap – I think the trap is still in the stables.

Sam: At least you’ve still got room for a pony. What about dog carts pulled by Newfoundlands?

Caro: The RSPCA would have something to say! But we can sell the ride-on mower and bring back a herd of sheep – or goats – or alpacas.

Sam: Why cut the grass? You could make hay for haybox cookery!

Caro: Did it really work? I hear microwaves, pressure cookers and slow cookers use less fuel.

Sam: Remember leg-warmers? I knitted my own!

Caro: We should all learn to knit – or befriend an old lady who can.

Sam: A shoulder shawl really does keep you warm.

Caro: Keep your feet in a foot muff or on a foot warmer (fill it with hot water).

Sam: Tack a bit of old carpet over the letter box to avoid a howling draught.

Caro: And wear a vest.

****

Why not buy a Victorian terrace house and open up the fireplaces? If you’re lucky, you’ll find original cast-iron fire surrounds behind the boards and bricks. If not, buy some from a salvage yard. Double-glaze all the windows. And rebuild walls – what’s the opposite of “open plan”? Closed plan? Small spaces are easier to heat. Put back the wall between what was the “front parlour” that was kept for best and visitors, and the kitchen. Make that back room into a kitchen with an Aga that’s always on. Live in this room – bring in the telly and a sofa. Cook and eat round the kitchen table you’ve bought from a hipster café that’s gone bust. For night-time, make the beds with blankets under the bottom sheet, and three duvets.

My mother used to knock herself out chopping logs so that she could build a fire in the sitting room. When we moved into the draughty, unmodernised Victorian servants’ quarters of a big house (cut off to make a separate dwelling), this was the only source of heating apart from the Aga and paraffin stoves. She carried on chopping when we had central heating and it wasn't necessary. I see her point – it’s attractive and cosy and gives the room a “focal point”, as decorators say. You can’t huddle round a night-store heater. But she could have hired somebody to chop the logs.

People are now "ripping out" their Agas because they're too expensive to run. We fuelled ours with phurnacite (compressed coal-dust blocks). It would cost less, but it's not great for the environment, or the lungs of anyone living nearby.

I love autumn – new shoes, pencil cases, crisp leaves & crisp air - but a bit alarmed I already have to wear two cardigans to work from home. Absolutely no heating goes on until October in this house so I just have to … think of apple crumble and cute scarves, I guess. (@lottelydia. Charlotte, you could change the rules.)

Fuel crisis? Hurrah! Means I’ve won the argument with my wife over the thermostat. (@Lord_Steerforth, paraphrase.)

More tips here, and links to the rest.

RIP Queen Elizabeth II

2022-09-20T05:08:00.005-07:00

Mourners enter the Abbey, in pearls and boaters,
Black in hats and dresses, in simple outlines,
Suits and ties and orders, and fascinators,
Sitting where told to.

Soon we hear from Purcell, and Bach on organ.
Lady Scotland reads now, likewise the Prime Minister,
Here comes the Archbishop, who gives the sermon,
Still in our places.

Walkers follow coffin, with drummers drumming,
Playing stately marches, so all can keep time.
Whitehall, through the Horseguards, and down the Mall with
Cheering and clapping.

Left wheel round the statues, and up the Long Walk.
Bearers waiting blank-faced, beneath triumphal
Arch at route’s end looming, a hearse stands empty.
When will they get here?

No more tragic dirges – no time for Handel.
Cars set off for Windsor, a sound of birdsong,
Rumbling wheels on tarmac, and far-off cheering,
Throwing carnations.

On by warehouse, terrace, past shop, past garage,
Poplars, rivers, bus stops. On bridges, pavements,
Central reservations, and lonely driveways,
Saying their goodbyes.

Halt in rural roadway, with fields on both sides,
Met by men in helmets and red and gold lace,
Cars drive slowly uphill towards a castle.
Carpets of flowers.

Now give rest, O Lord, to thy servant Elizabeth.

(With apologies to Sappho and John Betjeman.)

Essence of Britishness

2022-09-19T08:53:00.003-07:00

Want to pass as British? The following tips may help.

Complain that death is the last taboo and that the Victorians did it better, moan about the British stiff upper lip and our inability to express emotion, and then lay on a parade for the death of a monarch that is a magnificent work of art in itself.

But don't forget to accuse everyone of mourning in the wrong way.

“Everybody knows this, but nobody will admit it” is something you could chant at intervals during the day and always be right. Also: "We say we do THIS, but actually we do THAT." The British middle classes know what their society is like – snobbish and exclusive for a start – but they pretend to believe it is very different. As E.M. Forster once said, "The female mind, though cruelly practical in daily life, cannot bear to hear ideals belittled in conversation". For example, young women’s lives are all about attracting a man, and society needs them to pair off, but the girls have to say they're keen on getting an education and embarking on a career. (Working class girls have kids young, then start a business.)

When two new tube stations open, moan that they're unnecessary, and explain that new flat owners prefer to take the bus.

Avoid innovations that will make your life easier.

Send journalists to stand bare-headed in a typhoon/blizzard, and then moan that they're standing bare-headed in a typhoon/blizzard.

When there's a run on petrol because of a shortage of tanker drivers, refuse to "panic buy". You feel superior – you just can’t go anywhere. While moaning about the media fuelling a buying frenzy, whinge that you can’t now drive to Scotland as planned.

Times columnist Carol Midgley is “egged”: It left me winded and pathetically shocked, though of course I pretended to laugh heartily so I didn’t lose face in front of strangers who witnessed it.

Everybody hates the Big Light – the central ceiling light that has been a feature of British rooms since the days of gaslight. A switch by the door turns it on – but you mustn’t. Nobody removes the Big Light or even removes the bulb. Nobody reroutes the switch so that it turns on wall uplighters. Because then they’d have nothing to moan about, and no way of subtly putting down visitors who don’t know that We Never Turn On The Big Light.

Take your children for a fun day out at a “dull” historical site and give them “dry” lectures about its origins. Persuade them that camping is fun. (Daily Mash. The historical site is probably also “free”, with nowhere to buy sweets, postcards or even a cup of tea.)

Become effusively friendly to your neighbours as they are loading their furniture into the van before they move to France. Lament that you never got to know them better as you wave them off.

Acknowledge that prejudice is wrong, celebrate diversity in street festivals, yet threaten to shoot anyone who says "Can I get a latte".

Accuse the Americans of being hegemonic imperialist expansionists (and vice versa).

Manage not to see that we took our numbering system and religion from the Middle East, and our language from Germanic and French invaders.

Be proud of our Anglo-Saxon heritage, while assuming history started in 1066, when the Anglo-Saxons lost.

The BBC will broadcast “very British” escapist and resilience advice shows intended to help viewers through the “tough times ahead” caused by the cost of living crisis. The programmes include a new David Attenborough series about UK wildlife and a week of cost of living-themed programmes, including a decluttering series, Sort Your Life Out, fronted by Stacy Solomon. The corporation’s director of unscripted, Kate Phillips, said the BBC wants “to bring audiences together”. (The Week)

The most bizarre thing about the British right’s entirely fantasised war on Christmas is their furious defence of German traditions related to a Middle Eastern religion imported by a bunch of Italians. (@cooraysmith)

When the weather turns nasty, or spring evenings are a little chilly, declare: "That's it! I don't believe in global warming any more!"

A group of teenagers on the bus neglects to get up when there are elderly people standing. "I gave up my seat and stared at them, but they just continued to sit there!" comments someone who could not be more passive aggressive if they tried. Do you need a script? How about: You could give this lady a seat.

Moan at length about "double bagging" on the Tube, while apparently unable to form the words "Would you mind moving your bag so that I can sit down?"

Whinge at length on Twitter and to your friends about young people on public transport who listen to music and watch videos without using headphones, with their feet on the seats. Describe the way you sat there speechless, getting more and more furious, and catching the eyes of other travellers. When asked why you didn't say anything, explain "Even if they stop, it's unpleasant". Keep to yourself the great British middle-class principle: "We do not talk to people to whom we have not been formally introduced."

British pavements are swept (sometimes by robots), but nobody washes the paving stones. In some locations there's nowhere to put rubbish out but round a bin, or under a tree. The surface gets covered in a smelly black slick. Everyone waits for the violent rainstorm that will wash it away – but they don't go out with a yard broom and some Flash and SCRUB the walkway. That would be far too sensible.

The land under and around bus stops belongs to the transport company, not the council, so nobody cleans the stops. People like to sit there and eat a Thai green curry while sipping (and spilling) a latte. Again, what's the strategy? Wait for the next heavy rainstorm.

Don't ask for help, then when none is offered say "Thank you very much!" sarcastically, then complain about the incident to someone else, while congratulating yourself on your directness.

I was making tea for an annoying colleague at work. I deliberately used the same spoon to hoik out the teabag from his cup that I'd just used to stir my coffee. (@fesshole)

I voted Green – to send THEM a message.

More here, and links to the rest.

Beat the Heat

2022-08-03T02:05:00.004-07:00

A photosensitive friend reports that, when she carries an umbrella on a torrid sunny day, she gets barracked: “Oi, look, she thinks it’s raining!” (That's Audrey Hepburn in the picture.)

In the sun, my fair-skinned mother wore dark glasses, a hat, a scarf, and a long-sleeved shirt and didn’t care about being thought eccentric, but she was mortified when I wore white gloves to protect my sunburned hands at an al fresco lunch party. (She was still bringing it up decades later.)

Will global warming mean the Brits carry parasols and flutter fans? Or will they just be too embarrassed? Whenever I use a fan, on a bus or at a concert, people nearby say “Oh, that’s lovely! Send it this way!” But they never pick up a fan themselves. It may need a first-person article: "I carried a parasol and fanned myself in public and survived."

For years we thought that the old air conditioner in our room was inoperable because there was no control for it until last summer when we did a bit of a clear-out and found the on-off switch behind some files. It works fine. We sat sweating through summer after summer. (Lawyer Adam Wagner)

In a 70s office block (now demolished), we sweltered. We couldn’t open the huge, heavy windows as there was no way to stop them slamming shut, and besides, all our papers would get blown about. We had electric fans, and sprays for watering the plants – we directed the spray at the fan – bliss! We also ate lunch on the roof.

Annual hot weather reminder that if you’ve got sash windows and open them equally at top and bottom you can enjoy some Victorian “air conditioning” that ventilates and removes heat. (@jester Jun 9 2023)

The Victorians also planted shady bowers – and created water features. They wore broad hats and carried parasols. And they put their hair up.

Awnings fixed above all your windows create a cool temperature inside the room. And they protect your shop-window display from the sun. Time to bring them back! (Via @DarrenMcLean_uk, 2023)

Shutters will do the same. Or fix a foil blanket over the whole window, says Morning Live.

There are several books on “dry gardening”, such as Gardening in a Changing Climate by Ambra Edwards. Plant shrubs and trees for shade, and install beach umbrellas, a gazebo and a large paddling pool. Hydrate plants with “grey” water – bath, washing-up.

Paper fans can be bought online, or in Chinatown. Chinese paper umbrellas are available online. Or why not a colourful golf umbrella? Or, if you’re a real rebel, one with a firm’s logo? Or a child’s brolly with cat’s ears? To find something like a traditional parasol, try searching for "pagoda umbrella" or "steampunk umbrella". You can get a long-handled parasol from Move Dance. They have lace umbrellas too, as do bridal suppliers. Hello, street-corner purveyors of shawls, hats and umbrellas – why not stock some parasols?

Men: instead of 3/4 cargo shorts worn at half-mast, why not a cool, floor-length kaftan? And get a short back and sides, shave your head, or sport a man-bun.

Women: an updo is cooler. As are short hair and a cotton sports or plunge bra. Thank goodness buffet dresses (long, big, loose, ruffled) are popular – or were a few years ago. A long, drapey skirt will also act like a fan and cool your legs.

All genders: go for loose cotton or linen.

Wet towel on the back of the neck.

Bathe bare arms and neck in tepid water and sit by the fan.

Do the same with an aromatic wet wipe.

For the home, current advice is to install outdoor shutters (shut them for coolness in summer, warmth in winter). Also to shut windows and close curtains... I’ll still be opening all my windows – I’m lucky, I’m five floors up. I’ve been securing them with tie-belts – “casement stays” are not very effective. It makes sense to close curtains where the sun is streaming in – and it’ll save your upholstery and pictures from bleaching.

Put a plastic bottle 3/4 full of water in the freezer. Take out when frozen and scatter several around the house. Or position in front of the fan.

Put a tray full of ice cubes in front of the fan.

Fill the bath with cold water and leave it – you can splash or paddle occasionally.

Hang wet sheets over windows – or dry sheets for shade.

Leave internal doors open – and shut them in the winter.

Open the hatch into the attic and the hot air will rise into it. If the attic has a window, open it.

Reuse that Victorian foot-warmer - fill it with cold water and ice. Or use it as a foot bath.

Don’t keep your crystal ball on a windowsill – it can refract the light and even cause a fire! Watch out for magnifying mirrors, too.

Drink a lot – water and fruit juice with ice. Keep a covered jug or bottle of water in the fridge. Or a metal water bottle. So what if the BBC tells you to do this several times a day.

Architects, builders: design large windows that can open (and be securely propped open). On both sides of the building, for through draughts. Install natural aircon in the form of windcatchers. If steel-and-glass offices and flats can have large windows, why can't new houses modelled on Victorian cottages? And for large public buildings, three times as many women's toilets as gents', and some gender-neutral cubicles. When a venue has to employ "toilet queue co-ordinators", you know something is wrong.

Councils – plant trees. (Happening, 2024.)

Shops – install awnings.

Update 2025: We’re going through a strange moment with airconditioning. Government says new builds shouldn’t have it, because those who can’t afford it will feel hard-done-by. They don’t put it like that, they waffle about “inequality”. Meanwhile Guardianistas can hardly bring them selves to touch it. Something sinful about being comfortable. And it’s technology – vulgar, common, you can’t get a unique artisanal one hand-carved out of sustainable bamboo. Everyone gets the same. And it’s American. The British middle classes went through all this over central heating in the 70s. They also won’t take practical steps like fanning yourself, or even using electric fans. These came with the usual superstitions: “Don’t stand right next to it it’ll make you hotter”. A Guardianista in mid-rant confesses she has a cheap mobile aircon unit, “But we use it perhaps ten times a year!”. (Yes, but I didn’t inhale.)

In 2026 Americans are tweeting that the weird Europeans won't use aircon. And we don't have any ice cubes! (It's true some older Europeans think that a "courant d'air" (draught) is deadly.) Other Europeans, even those in planning departments, will suggest anything but aircon because "aircon is American.)

And there was a moment about 30 or 40 years ago when Upwards weren't sure they were allowed electric fans in the home. Too direct, too obvious, too practical, too bish-bash-bosh and terribly unspiritual. And unromantic! Many Upwards don't dare fiddle with the aircon in the meeting room or exercise class. They have polite squabbles about "if the fan is ON, we need to SHUT the doors because..."

Rowena installs a combination fan and ceiling light.

More here, and links to the rest.