Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Friday 29 October 2010

A golden era? More like leaden

Bloggers guilty of cynicism, practical jokes, inaccuracy, boasting, intellectual snobbery, phillistinism and ostentation should at least reveal their age, often the reason for these defects. As a regular practitioner of such vices I sought indemnity by including my age in my profile. Blogger has now removed this facility and I feel honour-bound to prove I am of a great age.

My primary school was lit with gas mantles.
Corporal punishment (by hand, ruler, cane and curtain-rod) was administered to pupils’ faces, the back of their necks, the front and back of their hands, their backsides and their thighs at my primary and grammar schools.
Our milk was delivered daily, ladled from a large bucket into my mother’s jug.
Waste metal was collected by a man with a horse-drawn cart.
Once a man appeared in our street (eight houses on either side), took off his cap and, without amplification asked us to vote against Sunday cinemas.
Dead cats abounded in the gutters of the main road.
Cashiers at Lingards, a one-floor department store in Bradford, sat in a central cage on a raised platform. Cash spent at counters travelled to the cashiers on wire-supported containers.
Barges used the Leeds-to-Liverpool canal commercially. We swam in it.
Ever hungry, I could never come to terms with canned snoek.
My preferred bought-in treat was chips with “a cake” – two discs of potato on either side of a thin slice of fish, deep-fried.
My father bought large quantities of eggs, illegally, from farmers. My mother preserved them in a gloop based on isinglass.

I feel no nostalgia for any of this.