Shiny old learnings

[hirez]

 It's that time of year when I listen to 'Tour de France Soundtracks' semi-obsessively and wait for the days to get longer and the cycling season to start properly. 

 

(Volta ao Algarve / Ruta del Sol / Tour of Murcia / Strade Bianchi / Omloop / etc)

 

Earlier in the week, I'd beetled off into Bath to get Ma a tin of Silvo. Because Bath is Bath, there's one shop hidden at the back of the Guildhall market where you can buy useful things like slug killer, metal polish, cheap and nasty karabiners, baluns, hoseclips.. The sorts of thing that you could see the sort of people you expect to live in Bath would send out the housekeeper (who cannot afford to live in Bath) to find. Or more likely would not actually understand were things, but would expect them to exist anyway.

 

I relay this intelligence to Ma, and I start jabbering about the way polishing the silver seemed like a horrible job when I was six or eight. (Yes, we had enough silver for polishing it to be A Thing. See also not having to buy furniture, central heating being an unfathomable modernity, learning to drive in a Range Rover, wanting to destroy the patriarchy)

 

This led to further speculation about the hatefulness of modern living and how it seems to have driven a generation into industrialised nostalgia with their retro-gaming, she-ra backpacks and eighties/nineties/britpoop nights.

 

"You know, your grandfather kept a shire horse long after tractors had taken over farm work. She was called Nancy. He just kept her because he'd worked with horses growing up."

 

Modern life has always been rubbish.

 

Comments

[inulro]

I have my grandmother's Nice Cutlery. It's ridiculously fiddly and ornate. I had the choice of that or my mother's, and I was going to go for my mum's on the basis that "I'm not polishing that!".

My mother gave me the "are you stupid?" look and said "do you really think your grandmother had time to polish silver? That's stainless steel".

Grab.

Sometimes I'm glad I'm a peasant.