Two-Facebook

 

I have an admission. I still use Facebook, although it's more out of inertia than anything positive relating to the "experience", which is going from bad to worse.

I've a few friends from the 2010s who I still keep in touch with there.

I've got a "Sickly Cakes" album that I like to update.

I'm in a few groups - writers, ex-colleagues, local busybodies - that it's worth keeping up with.

And I have my books page, The Bother in Burmeon & Chums, which has been bumbling along since 2012 and I see no reason to bring it to a halt.

But I may have to. Last week, after posting the gorgeous retro-ads from Punch 1968 here, I thought I'd put them on Facebook, too. It wasn't long before I was given a good ticking-off:

Your Page, The Bother in Burmeon & Chums, didn't follow the rules, so it isn't being suggested to other people at the moment.

Hi Susan,

Your Page or some of its content didn't follow our Recommendations Guidelines. These guidelines determine what content can be recommended to people. To be eligible for recommendations, either fix these issues or request a review.

I started a wild goose-chase around Facebook and ended up not much the wiser about which particular rules hadn't been followed. This shed a little more light on things, but only a sliver:

No humans seem to have been involved in the decision. I'm certainly not guilty of trying to sell weapons, odd kidneys, body parts of protected species. Or depicting graphic violence or pornography.

The closest I come to "promoting the use of certain regulated products" is that my post featured some rather quaint 58-year-old print ads for cigs, booze and razor blades. 

Ho hum.

And I would have forgotten all about it by the next morning had I not received a slew of pushy messages prompting me to make an ad out of the offending post:

Oh, good grief, I thought.

It's rather like those telecoms companies where they're banging on about purpose and sustainability on the one hand and trying to get you to upgrade your tariff with more and more super-mega-giga data volume on the other. 

Maybe it's no wonder that I'm at my happiest living in the past.

 

RETROWURST: Wizard ads, old boy (March 1968)

 

Chocks away and time for a swift flypast of the world of print advertising in the 1960s. Some of my earliest memories of advertising trace back to this era. I've had a delightful trip down memory lane in the pages of Punch, the RAF Fiftieth Birthday Number, dated 13th March 1968.

I'll start with the two best-placed (and most expensive) ads. Back cover and inside front cover. These were the pole positions back in those days. And it's no surprise that they're occupied by two of the brands most associated with pilots and derring-do:

I love the sheer heroic aplomb of these ads. There's a supreme confidence about them, a simple assuredness, rather reflecting the character of the (idealised) target audience.

The colour ads in the body of the magazine are a little more subtle. The reader has to be momentarily distracted from the cartoons and articles and find something intriguing enough to look further. Here are two booze brands - Martini and Guinness:

The advertising spans the expected categories - ciggies, booze, clothes, cars, travel, banking - with brands such as Senior Service, Glenfarclas, Courage, Wolseley, Church's Shoes, Trevira, Lombard Banking, TAP Airlines, Pure New Wool/Woolmark and High Speed Gas (remember that?)

And there were job ads, too. I expect this wasn't designed to be an interactive ad, and it's probably as well I didn't pursue a career in Art Direction:

Punch, like many of the brands featured, died with the 20th century. 

But there's a useful archive here , should you want to see what raised a chuckle or two in the days when pilots weren't on automatic.

Lifetime brands

 

I’m on the (fingers still crossed) last lap of the house sale and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a period of such intense physical and emotional exhaustion. OK, I’ve brought it on myself in some ways: of course I could have thrown money at it and simply paid someone to do it. Sift through over 60 years’ worth of stuff. Find new homes for some and dispose of the rest as responsibly as possible. Maybe even make a little money in the process. But I simply didn’t have time. 

So if my posts here are lacking in depth, please forgive me. My brain is scrambled - I wake up at unearthly hours wondering what to do with that, what order to do x, y and z, fretting about the logistics of the whole thing, hoping to God that people turn up at the right time.

When I’ve gone to the local dump, aka tip, aka recycling centre, I’ve tried not to dwell on things. But my mind flashes back to when we’d go to the dump to find things, not chuck them. Some pram wheels, a baby billiard board - and, hey presto! - a go-cart. Fat chance of anyone finding anything I’ve chucked, though - they’d have to abseil down into the skips and then risk being crushed by the infernal machines, lurching over the containers like mechanical birds of prey.

It’s been a dusty parade of brand names, mostly long forgotten, that have tumbled into those skips. Occasionally, I’ll find myself humming a jingle and seriously not know whether it was real, or something I made up when I was a small child. Pax-i-mat elect-ric!

But amongst these mid-century relics, there are a few brands that - I think - are in it for life. Like Thermos - in the same way as Hoover, is this a brand name or an item? I was slightly surprised to read that Thermos was founded in Germany (it now has its HQ in the US and is under Japanese ownership) - maybe that is significant, somehow.

My first memories of Thermos flasks were on Tarshyne Beach, Aden. All the families had them, to keep orange squash cold and coffee hot. Back then, they came in garish stripes like deckchairs, or a wicker design like the furniture in the Officers’ Club. Later, back in cold and gloomy Britain, they were lugged round caravan sites, lochs and glens, mountains and castles.

On the website today, the copy says that Thermos flasks are for “adventurers, explorers and everyday folks like us”...

... so I have a new-ish Thermos. It became my Covid companion on long drives from home to home. And the habit stuck. Here’s to the next adventure!

   

BREXILE: Lost Content

 

A spot of Brexile nostalgia - one of the first things to make a new home in Germany was The Shell Nature Book, published in 1964. Fifty years later, in 2014, I wrote about how this early example of “branded content” (yeurgh!) stirred my childhood imagination. 

My imagination (slightly addled) continues to be stirred.

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LOST CONTENT

 

The usual portal to the landscapes of childhood, those blue-remembered hills, is a photograph album. Something with tassels and stiff dark pages, perhaps. Or from a later era: once-sticky backing sheets that now release fading squares like autumn leaves.

 

But not for me. Those happy highways are captured only in slides, packed in their yellow and white boxes, dated with Dymo tape and relegated to the category of one-day-we’ll-sort-those-out.

 

No, my vehicle to the vistas of days gone by belongs to the collective, not the personal. A book, one that I’m sure many 1960s families possessed. But with the boundless and borderless imagination of a child, I made it my own. The process of growing up involves the setting of more and more boundaries. What is real. What is imagined. What is present experience. What we can see. What we can’t. As a child, these merge into one, as they did each time I opened that book. I made it an interactive medium before the notion was ever dreamed of.

 

My copy of The Shell Nature Book was published in 1964. Bought, I expect, by my parents on their return from the barren rocks of Aden. Were they driven by underlying guilt? Their two small offspring had been deprived of the British countryside for most of their lives. That we had paddled daily in a warm sea and conversed with camels did little, perhaps, to mitigate this imagined deficit.

 

The book has seen better days. Although, like a much-loved toy, I still see it as I did then. The cover picture, with its unlikely juxtapositions of butterflies and bats, birds and beetles, night and day, lies under cellophane courtesy of my mother. As a primary school teacher, she knew the secrets of protection from eager clumsy thumbs and sherbet-licked fingers. Inside, the pages are still shiny as mother-of-pearl, faintly redolent of the print room.

 

I still wonder that “branded content” – for this is the 21^st century term for such publications – can be of such high and utterly lasting quality. Shell’s reputation these days has so much of the negative baggage associated with the fossil fuel industry that the words “Shell” and “nature” sit uneasily together. But the list of contributing painters (not illustrators) reads like a Who’s Who of mid-20^th century British talent. S.R.Badmin, Edith and Rowland Hilder, John Leigh-Pemberton … In between war service – often as not for the RAF – their work was commissioned by the Ministry of Information, by London Transport, by Ladybird Books.

 

These paintings captivated me, and I would lose myself in their Arcadian landscapes. The Flowers of the Countryside section, arranged by month, features a detailed foreground by Edith Hilder against a backdrop stretching into infinity, by her husband. In June, a rustic wooden pail brims with dog roses, foxgloves and wild irises, buzzing with summer, while the background of ivy-clad ruins – and a blue-remembered hill – fades mysteriously under a high sun.

 

S.R.Badmin’s painting of Trees and Shrubs for May beckoned me in, from the balcony, overhung with Horse Chestnut candles, down, down, under caterpillar-green beech leaves and wild cherry blossom, to the lake, where a boat waits ready to row to the island. John Leigh-Pemberton’s Life on the Downs scared me a little with its soft eeriness – sinister fairies had surely not long departed the ring of mushrooms nestling under that foreboding, rainbow-streaked sky.

Many of these paintings merged into real places plucked from my 1960s Home Counties world. The Hilders’ May with its backdrop of oast houses and rolling hills mirrored the view from my paternal grandparents’ Kent garden. Badmin’s July, all clipped hedges and lawns, seemed to echo with the clipped accents of the Air Force Staff College. And the Rowland Hilder and Maurice Wilson sun- to moonlight scene with young badgers frisking oblivious to the stateliness of the white mansion in the background was surely a corner of Windsor Great Park.

 

Amid these scenes of moor and meadow, cornfields and copses, like the evil godmother at the christening, lurked a stranger section to the book. Entitled Fossils, Insects and Reptiles, the paintings are by Tristram Hillier, who I have since learned was a British Surrealist, influenced by de Chirico and Max Ernst as well as Paul Nash, with whom he worked. And here they were, the bits that didn’t fit in the golden land of the other paintings. Creepy-crawlies, lower forms of life. Parts discarded by death. Or that not yet alive. Shells. Moths. Birds’ eggs. Skulls.

 

Hillier’s painting entitled Fossils epitomises this curious world that skulks below the surface of the sunlit British countryside. A quartet of books sits on a desk, two of these perched on a Pandora-esque box. Proper learned books, with stiff spines, muted cloth covers and old gold lettering: Elements of Geology, Vol II. And growing out of the volumes, like petrified fungi, are the fossils. Corals the shade of ancient teeth, a sea-urchin resembling a decaying bun – and the “ites”, iron-grey relics from way beyond the Iron Age. Belemnites, Pyrites, Ammonites.

 

One ammonite sits at the centre of the display, a perfect specimen, although all ammonites are perfect in their neatness, coiling for eternity to the centre. They are described in terms of extinct weights and measures – “vary from penny size to giants two feet across.” 

 

Before leaving this page, the eye is drawn to the left of the desk. A used match lies there, carelessly placed but carefully painted. Did Hillier light a pipe – perhaps the one that appears in his otherworldly study of moths three pages later – before he embarked on his work? Was this a hint towards the carboniferous era? Or simply a surreal gesture?

 

In these days of Google Earth, we can travel to any landscape on the globe in a matter of seconds. We never have to visit the same scene twice. Yet I still have a yearning for these scenes of my childhood, for they have not been fossilised. Viewing them today, memories and experience combine with my immediate perception, to create something of wonder anew.      

Mixed up, muddled up, shook up world

 

I had a lucky childhood.

I grew up believing I could do anything or be anything I wanted. If I set my mind to it hard enough.

At the age of 3 or so (above) I was convinced I was a dog.

I wasn’t at all concerned about whether I was a male dog or a female dog - it seemed irrelevant. I didn’t have any dolls - just a pack of furry toys. Many of them were dogs.

My hair was cut short and I tended to wear my brother’s hand-me-downs. It was a question of practicality. I did have a blue party dress with a sticking-out skirt, which I hated wearing. Not because it was a dress, but because it was itchy.

The boys’ clothes continued into my teens. I grew my hair a bit longer in the 70s, but so did my brother and most of the boys I knew. I do remember us getting muddled up by an elderly relative, who’d thought “the boy was the older one.” He was in purple cords, I was in a Ben Sherman shirt and jeans. We thought it was funny, a bit subversive. 

If you look at photos of groups of young people in the late 60s, 70s and 80s, the boys and girls look pretty similar. From Woodstock to the New Romantics. I dug out what I think must be a book to accompany an exhibition, entitled 14:24 British Youth Culture. It was published in 1986.

You can see the effect in these photos of punks and skinheads by Nick Knight.

But something started happening just after my son was born, in 2000. When he was small, our house was a sea of yellow, blue and red plastic. I bought his clothes from flea markets.

But I did start noticing that the brand new toddlers’ clothes in H&M were sectioned off  into “boys” and “girls”. For  “Mummy’s little man” and “Daddy’s princess."

And Lego had started producing rather “girly” toys.

And our neighbours/fellow primary school parents would have parties where men and women sat in different rooms. Or even “women/men only” parties. This latter phenomenon I initially (rather snobbishly) put down to class or maybe educational level. Or possibly even an age thing, although this seemed unlikely as it didn’t seem to reflect any kind of progress.

And that “Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars” book started a whole industry of pop-gender-psychology. Excerpts from 1950s publications coursed around the internet, demonstrating how dreadful life was for women in the 20th century. I found these somewhat suspect - my mum had two degrees and was better academically qualified than my dad.

Ten years ago, we had the whole full-blown pink glitter pony stuff spilling from the kindergarten into adult life.  

And then came the whole #MeToo thing, the victim/oppression/patriarchy stuff and the omnipresent adjective “toxic.” 

I wondered why on earth I’d want to join a “women only” group from my college, that I’d deliberately chosen because it was mixed. And whether segregation really is progress. 

This data, published recently in the Financial Times, didn’t really surprise me.

But some of the extreme reactions I saw on LinkedIn certainly did. A lot of screeching about how this is evidence that all young men are unredeemable sexist and racist bastards.

Still, I can look forward with optimism. I hear there’s a brilliant new invention called “gender-neutral clothing” for children.

Whatever will they think of next?

Nothing new under the (shaded-off from the Earth) sun?

 

I do love all those lists of trends and innovations and predictions of stuff that’s really, eventually, going to happen this next year. A lot of these articles take the form of lists of 22-whatevers this year, and typical is this one from The Economist on emerging technology to watch in the next 12 months.

There’s a mix on here, of the here-we-go-again science fiction cliches (Flying Electric Taxis, Space Tourism), the ones that are already on my radar (if radar isn’t too primitive a technology to refer to) - the Metaverse, Hydrogen-powered Planes, Vertical Farming and Personalised Nutrition, for example.

And the ones where I think - yes - great idea - bring it on tomorrow! Container Ships with Sails, or Vaccines for HIV and Malaria, for example.

But with one of the 22, I sorted of shrugged my shoulders. I’m talking about Virtual Influencers - see Lil Miquela/Miquela Sousa above.

The article highlights how these virtual influencers won’t get embarassingly drunk at a party, or old and wrinkly, as if this was something new. But there were plenty of pre-teen/young teen virtual influencers back in the last century. And many of these are still influencing today - for example, the Scooby Doo gang selling sunglasses. In fact, Velma is probably responsible for the entire Geek Girl fashion industry single-handedly.

Whether officially attached to a brand, or generally influencing fashion and music, pre/teen characters have long been a tried and trusted standby to attract young audiences. Like today’s virtual influencers, they can’t grow up and commit some unspeakable crime, or be caught on camera associating with dubious and unsavoury sorts - it’s all nicely under control. And they can welcome new pals and chums into the gang to fit with the prevailing social climate, too.

It probably all started with these two:

By the late 80s, a “Kids’ Club/Gang” was almost a mandatory. At Saatchi UK, we worked on the launch of Burger King in the UK:

Maybe the most influencial virtual influencers in North America in the mid/late 20th century were these guys - and I think they are still going - they really nailed the multi-media thing, with comics, a TV show, a No. 1 international hit single, promotions with all manner of brands - for example, this carboard record you could cut off the back of a cereal box:

Pour a little sugar (or healthier option) on it, honey!

Once again, the technology changes but the idea (or need) not so much.

 

The continentalisation of the UK

When I was a small child, in the 1960s, people spoke about “The Continent”, meaning mainland Europe. A person, a foodstuff, an attitude, was described as “continental”, in a sligtly disapproving tone,  meaning unusual and a little racy on the one hand, but “not quite what we do around here” on the other.

From an early age, I was fascinated by “The Continent” and all the treasures it might hold, approved-of or not. I blame Caroline and her Friends. For those who’ve never had this delight, Caroline was a bossy little girl accompanied by a menagerie of dogs, cats (domestic and Big) and a lone bear. This motley crew got into all kinds of scrapes, going camping, on ski holidays, or touring around “The Continent” - stuffing themselves with spaghetti or Belgian Frites, hurling Dutch cheeses around or playing Alphorns. I have imitated much of this behaviour throughout the course of my life. 

Some of my earliest food-related memories relate to finding unusual brands and products in slightly obscure places. There was this cafe and health food shop just down the road from us, for example:

Deborah’s was a vegetarian cafe and sold Birchermüsli as well as breakfast products such as Frugrains - which I can still taste - datey.

It wasn’t long, of course, before muesli became big business in the UK, with the launch of Alpen in 1971. Ski yoghurt - another “continental idea” which took a while to catch on, had been launched in the 1960s.

As well as the quirky Deborah’s, I remember the glorious smell of coffee roasting in a shop called Brimson’s in Camberley, and the first time I tried a croissant (from a “Continental” bake shop in Reading) - all very Proustian. Then there were the expeditions to a “delicatessen” in Ascot, mainly so my mum could buy the products she remembered from Canada - Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima. This wonderful emporium sold exotic cocktail snacks, such as ROKA cheese biscuits. I see the packaging design has hardly changed, although I think they used to come in a tin.

All this continentalisation culminated in a coach trip around Europe, maybe following in Caroline & Co.’s foot- and pawprints. Here, I got to know even more continental culinary delights (and some not so delightful) as well as duvets, dirndls and dobra veče (yes, the tour ventured into what was then Yugoslavia).

I’ve now finally booked a trip back to the UK, the first since we became properly Brexitted. 

I’m hoping that Britain won’t have become decontinentalised as far as food and drink goes, anyway.