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Everything has changed and we face a new future. The whole culture of gratuitous consumerism no longer seems fulfilling and we can't afford it anyway. So what do we do? Become helplessly nostalgic for the past.
We've started looking back to war-time Britain for inspiration — ostensibly to learn the necessary lessons of thrift from the last generation able to teach them to us, but in fact, I think, to seek comfort from baseless nostalgia and proxy patriotism. And the publishers are now fairly pumping out accelerants to service this craving.
HarperCollins has just reprinted a series of books produced to look like the war-time originals but priced at a thoroughly modern tenner apiece. Sew and Save advises on how to make your coupons go round, tricks for smartness and ideas for hats. Food Facts for the Kitchen Front contains recipes for Lord Woolton pie, swede soup, and baked stuffed sheep's heart. Make Your Garden Feed You recommends not just “Poultry-Keeping in War-Time” but “Rabbits for Flesh and Fur”.
Meanwhile, the ever-adaptable Hunter Davies has just published his own contribution to this genre, Cold Meat and How to Disguise It: A History of Advice on How to Survive Hard Times. At least he makes a rambling joke of it. “I can remember clothes rationing during the last war but, as a boy, it didn't really bother me much,” he burbles.
Altogether more ambitious and systematic is the forthcoming Sucking Eggs: What Your Wartime Granny Could Teach You About Diet, Thrift and Going Green by Patricia Nicol. But although she has made a serious study of government-imposed austerity in the Forties, she ends each chapter with her own contemporary eco-tips, making the book yet another delusional mélange, “perfect for the environmental and nostalgia markets”, the publishers crow.
What's so grotesque about this trend is not merely that it's one more example of the dreadful British tendency to self-glorifying reversion — strand a bunch of Brits for long enough in a foreign airport and sooner or later they'll congratulate themselves on their Dunkirk spirit — but that the whole thing is yet another example of the very phenomenon it claims to deplore: pointless shopping, salvation through consumerism. None of these books will be purposefully used. They are themselves just lifestyle accessories, baubles.
The future is not so easy to face now, it's true. Face it we must, though. Cutely looking backwards is no way forward.
Can Keira do Kazuo justice?
Shooting started this week on the film of Kazuo Ishiguro's great novel, Never Let Me Go, which clearly should have won the Booker Prize in 2005. Its portrayal of children cloned to provide body-parts when they grow up is unforgettably haunting. Alex Garland has written the script and the blessed Keira Knightley stars. But can such an unsparing and dismaying story ever make a popular movie?
Another great novel of recent years, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, was due to be released as a film — starring Viggo Mortensen — last November. Frustratingly, it has still not been seen, apparently because at test screenings audiences found its portrayal of human extinction too depressing. Producer Harvey Weinstein is said to be trying to find a more upbeat conclusion — a feelgood finish to a film about the reduction of the last remnants of mankind to cannibalism.
Let's hope the producers of Never Let Me Go will stick to the writer's vision, however lowering.
Goldmine of fractious facts
The 2009 edition of Social Trends, the overview of the state of the nation from the Office for National Statistics, is 252 pages long, so it's not surprising that most news reports of it concentrated on the figures highlighted in the press releases (such as more women under 25 having babies than getting married).
But the report contains more useful info than any other publication, particularly if you like getting into arguments. The driving test pass rate is higher for men (47 per cent) than for women (41 per cent). English people eat more fruit and vegetables than the rest of the UK, while the Welsh consume the most sugar and alcohol. Motorcycling, walking and cycling have the highest fatality rates per kilometre travelled of all forms of transport.
It's a fact! Or, to put it another way, here's an arsenal of top-class ammo for causing offence really knowledgeably.
Reader views (1)
HOw I agree; all these rich middle-class writers/celebs jumping on the 'thrifty lifestyle' bandwagon- and making a fortune writing about it. Probably 80% of UK workers are just as well off as they were a year ago, but you'd think everyone was suddenly down to their last penny & having to darn socks & grow cabbages...
Restaurants & theatres are still full & the trains are still packed, so things aren't Depression-like..yet
- Naturally-Thrifty, Essex, 17/04/2009 17:38
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