On not putting your tie in the washing machine and other useful household tips

Posted on 23rd January 2022 by Ian

The burgundy red tie was very useful. Bought in TK Maxx for £10, it had been worn on many dozens of days at work. Its plain, understated colour meant it was compatible with a number of shirts and jackets.  Admittedly, it was past its best, the stitching on the reverse of the tie had begun to come unravelled and the tie itself was beginning to look a little tired. However, I had not expected its demise to come so rapidly.

Gathering a bundle of washing to put on a 30 degree wash, the tie lay among other clothes and was put into the machine. It came out with much of the stitching gone, with much of the white inner separated from the red outer, and completely misshapen. Is that what a delicate wash can do?

Had I known the tie was in the bundle, I would not have put it in the machine. Once, I threw my university tie into a cool wash, it came out looking like a hall of residence room on the morning after an undergraduate party.

Washing has been a challenging matter since the age of nineteen when I put a lamb’s wool pullover into a hot wash because I had spilled food down the front of it. It came from the machine clean of all stains and of a size that would have fitted a nine year old.

Shrinkage has not been as  common a problem as colours that run. Observing the instruction to “wash deep colours separately” does not guarantee that the blacks and the blues will not run into the reds, that a red sweatshirt will not come from the wash with dark marks across the chest.

The worst incident of colour-running was my six year old daughter’s Sunday dress. Navy blue and white, it was a favourite. It came from the machine with the white having been turned grey by the running blue. Going to the supermarket, I bought one of those products that said it removed colours that had run. I washed the dress in the remedy and the whole dress came out grey. Attending a seminar on the other side of Dublin, I nipped out of the morning session to go to an out of town shopping centre where Marks and Spencer mercifully had a dress that was identical to the original state of the one I had mislaundered.

Why is there not much more training in school about these essential things of life?

 

 

 

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Dining out

Posted on 20th January 2022 by Ian

Leaving the city centre restaurant and crossing the Liffey to walk through Temple Bar to catch the bus back to the flat, there seemed a great gulf between life now and the life of childhood years.

Perhaps Somerset was not a very sophisticated place, but restaurants seemed only to be found in hotels when I was young.There would have been the Langport Arms Hotel, and the Devonshire Arms Hotel in Long Sutton, and the White Hart in Somerton (an online search tells me that the White Hart has been taking paying guests since the 16th Century).

In my memory, at many hotels there would be a discreet notice advising potential customers that non-residents were welcome in the dining room, not that we would have been eating in a restaurant, and we certainly would not have been staying in a hotel.

There must have been times when, by force of circumstance, we ate out, but it is hard to recall there being more than a handful of places, none of which would have had table service.

There were a few occasions when we would have had a cup of tea and a biscuit in the cafe at the back of the Taunton branch of British Home Stores. On holiday, there might have been times when we ate at The Malibu Cafe in Westward Ho! On the annual village outing to the seaside town of Weymouth, sitting at a cafeteria table with crockery and cutlery we would have eaten our tea, fish and chips and peas, with bread and butter on side plates.

Absences from home were not frequent. Taking a picnic lunch or tea would generally have meant sandwiches packed into plastic lunchboxes. There would always have been cheese, sometimes with tomatoes, sometimes with Branston Pickle. (Fifty years later, my lunchbox is still cheese and pickle sandwiches, accompanied by three tomatoes).

If it was necessary to buy food when away from home, then it would generally have come from a fish and chip shop. Chips would be ordered with fish or with battered sausages. Set on a square of greaseproof paper, they would be wrapped in newspaper. Sometimes there would have been a preference for pasties, large oggies with meat and potato or with vegetable filling. The pasties had a distinctive and memorable peppery taste and were a filling meal for a child.

It would have been hard in such times to have imagined a life where eating out would have become a regular occurrence. Reflecting on moments long ago, there is a niggling sense of guilt at incurring unnecessary expenditures.

 

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Spectacles

Posted on 19th January 2022 by Ian

John Creedon must have struck fear into the hearts of many RTE Radio listeners this evening. He recalled the glasses given out by the Southern Health Board, “one size fits all,” he said. “They kept them in a tin and they were all brown.”

Perhaps the Southern Health Board in Cork got their glasses from the same supplier as the NHS in Devon. Perhaps the provision of ugly brown glasses to those who could not afford a private prescription reflected some Victorian value, the sort of thinking that said poorer people should never have things that were as nice as the things that richer people had. Perhaps it was simply the case that the brown pairs of glasses that must have been dispensed in their thousands were the cheapest available.

It was in the autumn of 1976 that a mobile clinic came to our remote Dartmoor school for us to undergo eye tests. It was immediately obvious that I was short-sighted and I was taken to an optician, probably in Newton Abbot, for a more thorough test. My glasses would be ready in a few days.

“Please, oh please, don’t let the glasses be the ugly brown ones,” I thought.

Of course, they were the ugly brown ones. It was 1976, the country was broke, the vanity of a teenage boy was not among the NHS list of priorities.

I never wore them. I pretended I could see. The only time I would take them out was to watch Match of the Day on a Saturday night, when the lights in the sitting room of the senior block were turned out and the only illumination came from the screen of the black and white television.

At Sixth Form college, I got a more fashionable pair. Well, a pair that were slightly less ugly, anyway. I would take them out for brief moments when squinting was not sufficient to read the diagrams drawn on the board by the economics teacher.

Such was my vanity, that it was not until I was in my early-twenties that I wore glasses regularly. There are photographs from forty years ago where they are not to be seen.

I hated wearing glasses. I hated hearing people being called, “speccy four eyes,” and other such pejorative terms.

Last week, I walked from the cold outdoor air into the warmth of the school. Wearing a mask meant my glasses steamed up. A colleague noticed and said she had had her eyes lasered.

A look in the mirror the next morning persuaded me that glasses were a preferable option. They aren’t nearly as ugly as the brown ones from teenage days and are much younger than the skin they conceal.

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Called back to the world of Janis Ian

Posted on 18th January 2022 by Ian

The two songs were introduced with the comment, “here’s two from 1979.”

Trying to recall the year concerned, I was not sure either of the recordings dated from that time of transition. Neither had the edginess of the closing days of the punk era. There was more the narcissism of the New Romantics than the nihilism of punk.

I’m in love with a German Film Star was never a favourite. However, the fact it was recognizable after more than forty years meant it must possess some memorable qualities.

The second song was the silky smooth Joe Le Taxi, by the enchanting Vanessa Paradis, who seemed to grow more beautiful as the years passed.

The mellifluous tones of the song conjured thoughts of Gallic laughter and Parisian charm and the sophistication of a young French woman who possessed that magical je ne sais quoi.

A Google search revealed Joe Le Taxi had been recorded in 1988, by which time the world of pop singers was a far remove from the life of a Church of Ireland curate.

Had it been 1979, Vanessa Paradis would have charmed a young sixth-form student. Except that even then there was a hard-headed realism that said such sophistication was far removed from a rustic, impecunious youth. The companionship of such a voice would be no more an attainable than would playing for the Chelsea football team he followed at the time.

The playing of the record was a reminder for someone who stood amongst the plain that there was a world that would forever be inaccessible, that boys on pushbikes with empty pockets passed unnoticed by the beautiful.

Perhaps the world of the plain is a safer place, it is a place where the predictable and the routine provide a daily order. Perhaps plainness is just an evolutionary fact of life, no more worth lamenting than realities such as ageing. Perhaps it is just part of an immutable natural order, something to be accepted without complaint.

Oddly, Vanessa Paradis’ voice evoked not the cosmopolitan life of Joe Le Taxi, but the hard reality of life described in Janis Ian’s At Seventeen:

I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth

 

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It’s wassailing time again

Posted on 16th January 2022 by Ian

Always a sceptical race, suspicious of innovation and resentful about change, it took the English one hundred and seventy years to accept the Gregorian calendar. Introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582, it was not introduced in England until 1752. The New Year then began on Lady Day, 25th March and it seems that a twelve day shift in the dates was not going to be allowed to change the real start of the New Year. If anyone is confused as to why the English financial and tax year begins on 6th April, it is because the calendar had advanced by twelve days.

Rural England is the most conservative part of a conservative country and the change in the calendar seems to have brought a determination to continue to observe the old dates in more spheres than just the financial.

Wassailing is a very ancient tradition that took place on Twelfth Night, 5th January, the eve of Epiphany and last night of Christmas. The ritual predated the adoption of the Gregorian calendar and so it continues to be observed twelve days later in some communities, thus it is that tomorrow night is Twelfth Night (although some communities have shifted their celebration of the wassails to the weekend) .

The wassail was a ritual asking God for a good apple harvest. Of course, the primary concern was to ensure there was a plentiful supply of apples for cider making.

William Holland, an irascible priest of the Church of England who ministered in the county seemed to have been displeased by local priorities. Around 1797, he wrote,

“The Somersetshire people are of large size and strong, but in my opinion are very slow and lazy and are very much given to eating and drinking.”

Holland was obviously a man who would have disapproved of much that happened in the county on Twelfth Night each year.

The wassailing tradition is strong around the Langport area.  The local tradition is to fire shotguns up through the branches of the apple trees to ensure a good harvest, along, of course with much eating and drinking.  In some places slices of toast soaked in cider, on which the robins can feed, are hung from the branches of the trees. It seems that robins represent the good spirits of the tree.

William Holland would have disapproved of such customs because they were, of course, pagan, but such objections would have excluded most of what is now assumed to be part of the Christmas celebration, including the tree.  When American traditions of Santa are embraced without question, to the extent that it would be a 21st Century heresy to go on radio or television and express doubt concerning his existence,  a bit of home grown paganism seems very inoffensive.

And this is the night of our jolly wassail;
Vor tis our wassail,
And tis your wassial,
And joy be to you, vor tis our wassail.

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