Past Times 2

I don’t write this blog to be read, really.  But a couple of people actually read the post on things that have vanished in my lifetime, and remarked on things that they missed. So here’s a second instalment.

First: the milkman. It was number two son who pointed out that he remembered the milkman delivering really clearly, and now they just don’t exist.  It’s a shame really, because it was an eco-friendly system, and also milkmen used to check up on old  and isolated people. For those of you who are too young, the milk was delivered by milkmen with electric “floats” at some ungodly hour in the morning.  In fact I actually remember horse drawn milk floats. The horse was so steady and had done the round so often that it would plod round while the milkman went up and down front garden paths, pausing occasionally for its driver to catch up!

You had an order, but most people had a carrying rack with an indicator so that you could change your order more or less daily if you wished. Once a week you’d leave an envelope with the money due, and every day you’d leave the empty glass bottles, rinsed out. You also needed a cover for the tops of the bottles, as blue tits pecked through the foil covers and drank the top of the milk. If you had a very late night out, you could “arrive home with the milkman”.  It’s sad. Plastic supermarket bottles are so boring in comparison.

Food shopping was altogether harder work. Cheese, butter and lard came in huge barrels and had to be cut to weight for the customer. Biscuits came in large tins and you bought a pound or half pound in a paper bag. It seems a strange way of selling them,  they must always have been soft or broken. In fact you could buy broken biscuits by the pound.

No one ate anything but white bread. I think our parents had consumed enough of the “national loaf” under war time rationing, to reject anything brown.

Crisps came in one flavour (potato) and included a little twist of blue paper containing salt. I seem to remember a crisp manufacturer trying to bring back the blue twist of salt, but it didn’t catch on.

Almost every proper meal included mashed potato. I used to be sent to the greengrocer to buy two stones of potatoes. I remember being quite puzzled in Kentucky, when menus presented mashed potato as a special treat. But only a few years later, a similar thing is happening in England. I even saw a “scientific” study which claimed that eating potato four times a week was bad for your health. Tell that to our parent’s generation, who ate potato a minimum of seven times a week and lived into their nineties.

Smoking really is bad for you, but practically everyone of our parent’s generation smoked. Often the women seemed to regard smoking as a bit of a treat to be indulged in at parties and Christmas. My parents used to buy a very large box of Balkan Sobranie cigarettes for the ladies at Christmas. They came in a variety of pretty pastel shades, and I remember them smelling lovely. Whether I would think they smell nice now, I rather doubt. Which has led me off at a tangent. E cigarettes smell disgusting, almost worse than the real things. And at least the real things could look cool – think of the David Bailey portrait of Michael Caine – whereas an e cigarette makes anyone look a prat.

No one smokes a pipe. When we went to the Kentucky State Fair (you get a bit desperate with teenage boys to entertain for six weeks in Louisville, where they know no one, and anyway everyone looks sideways at long hair and death metal T shirts) there was a pipe smoking competition. The competitors got a measured amount of tobacco and one match. The winner was the man who could keep his pipe alight longest. I don’t know who won. In the end the excitement got too much for us and we went off to see the pig races. Actually, it was a good day out, the boys really enjoyed themselves and I didn't have to keep telling them not to gawp. You were allowed to gawp at things, and there were no signs telling you not to carry concealed weapons. I could not stop the boys doubling over in hilarity at those. 

I did wonder about the effects on my mood of this sort of nostalgia. But mostly, it makes me realise that life is better nowadays. I would like the milkman back though.