World of Interiors 10

I admired a friend's house: she had a dish full of blue and white sherds which she had collected from the beach, and chandelier crystals hanging in the windows. I tried to copy, but the results always looked lame.

A childhood friend had a bedside light in the shape of a toadstool house with figures of elves. She also had a collection of glass swans and Wade china animals displayed on a shelf. I couldn’t understand why my mother wouldn’t let me have any of these beautiful things.

It was a shock when contemporaries moved from grubby student houses to grown-up flats with fitted carpets and proper furniture, and hoovered the carpets and kept the place tidy. I was also surprised that it had been their plan all along.

In Crouch End you are judged by the neatness of your log pile.

It was one of those little mid-Victorian corner tables — I believe they call them "what-nots" — which you will find in any boarding-house, littered up with photographs and coral and "Presents from Brighton." (The Power-House, John Buchan)

A new building is opened with great fanfare. Within a week, it is plastered with hand-written signs reading “EXIT”, “NO WAY OUT”, “DRAW BOLT AND TURN HANDLE”, “USE OTHER DOOR” and “FOR SOAP, PRESS BUTTON UNDER COUNTER”. Twenty years later, the notices are still there – tattered, torn and mended with yellowing sellotape.

Bournemouth's ignoble coast cowers to the right, heralding the pine-trees that mean, for all their beauty, red houses, and the Stock Exchange, and extend to the gates of London itself. So tremendous is the City's trail! (EM Forster, Howard’s End)

New buildings must be “in keeping” – but with what? Apparently it’s “the local”: a style that sprang straight from the earth, like Georgian and Victorian buildings in London stock brick.

The bar’s done up in a style called “Sheboygan rec room”: dark carpet; wood-panelled walls; plush, aging armchairs; smallish TVs. (catapult.com)

Someone has labelled Theresa May’s picture (with her husband, to show that she’s normal): “blousy curtains, floral footstool, showroom sofa, patterned cushions, spotless carpet”. The beige fitted carpet is clean, because she doesn’t have children, a fact she had to explain away in early July 2016. She also has a coolie-hat lampshade and some neat, pointed exposed bricks round the fireplace, a brass-mounted fire screen and a bunch of flowers in the grate.

Upgrade your home! 
Add recessed lighting
Reface your kitchen cabinets and add new handles
Buy a rug
Paint the walls
Install crown molding (a cornice), but remember it “looks best in traditional homes and can look out of place if you have an ultra-modern minimalistic home”.
(lifehack.org)

COUNTRY COTTAGESWhen Jilly Cooper wrote Class in the 70s, she noted that Upwards were struggling to afford second homes in the country. They were forced to buy “bolt-holes” so far out that they drove most of Friday evening to get there, and most of Sunday evening to get back to “town”. Poor loves! For most of us, country cottages are a thing of the past, but maybe Cooper moved in different circles.

I remember some friends at the time telling me about country cottages they had viewed – most of them were impossible due to improvements that weren’t, like woodchip wallpaper and carriage lamps outside. Easily removable, but what about the filled-in fireplaces? Another friend exposed the fireplace of his Cornish cottage: it had a massive stone lintel, and filled the room with smoke.

GET THE LOOK Tropicana Regency, Versailles Provençale (Great Interior Design Challenge)
Metallic, exotically printed fabrics scream Great Gatsby!
"My style is simple but very ornate..." (GIDC)

“Fits in with the whole country feel.” Money for Nothing on a sideboard made of a rusty feeding trough and some teak table-legs. “They have a lovely big rustic interior,” says Sarah Moores. Does “rustic” mean “living in a pigsty”, though?

“Aztec” is now applied to kilims and ikat – anything with blocks of colour with a jagged edge. I don’t know how the Aztecs would react to that, but it might involve sharp knives.


READERS, PLEASE COPY
In Babbacombe’s by “Susan Scarlett” (Noel Streatfeild), mother figure Mrs Carson is always doing up rooms on a shoestring with some “gay” or “dainty” cretonne curtains and bedcovers. Cretonne is stout cotton printed with a pattern, usually flowers, and Mrs C bought the fabric in a sale. Clearly readers were meant to follow her example. But what was Streatfeild warning against? Reusing old, dark curtains?

In a 70s Archers episode, Peggy talked of redecorating in earth colours (terracotta and peach). Would Peggy really do anything so hippy? (In the 70s everything suddenly became brown, cream or terracotta because we were worried about the environment.)

IT'S DECADENT TO...Decorate your pizzeria like a shipping warehouse.

Clad your tower block in brick panels. (I’ve even seen brick panels put on the wrong way up, with the bricks vertical.)

Paper your walls in a simulated concrete design.

Antic has taken over 45 venues and turned them into “granny chic” pubs. (Guardian June 2016) Clients may not realise that the “delightfully twee establishment... is owned by an aggressively expanding business”. They combine exposed brick walls with skip and boot sale furniture. Their designer says her job is about “taking risks. You might think, is that horrible or is that lovely? I’m not sure.” (So not “taking risks” as in kayaking up the Amazon?) They turned an old job centre in Deptford into a pub and called it The Job Centre. Local people were narked, and it closed. They’ve bought a concrete pub in Elephant. The designer says: “Yes, it’s carpark chic. Maybe that’s where I should be going with it.” (The Guardian writes as if “granny chic” was new, but it has been around in East London for about ten years like a blight.)

Ultra-cool Rowena Upward is building a new house modelled on ad hoc temporary dwellings, and filling it with orange plastic stacking chairs picked up from pavements. As she says, “It's no more patronising than doing up a thatched cottage that used to be a rural slum, or my ranch-style bungalow, modelled on the cabin of a settler in the Wild West”. Samantha is still wondering if Moroccan chic has gone out.

ANTIQUES
He had... a very large flat overlooking Marble Arch, impersonal and full of antiques which he paid a friend to choose for him. 'This is one of the biggest flats in London, and I can prove that', he said. 'It has ten rooms, three bathrooms and the furnishings are worth a fortune.' (Nik Cohn on the late Irvine Sellars of Mates boutique, a feature of Carnaby St in the 60s)

In the 50s, it was terribly grand to own a house which still had a powder closet – it showed that the house dated from the 18th century when the gentry needed a small room for powdering their hair or wig. But have we stopped trying to pretend we live at Chatsworth or Versailles at last?

Dining room tables and chairs, end tables and armoires (“brown” pieces) have become furniture non grata. (nextavenue.org)

Could hipsters save the antique furniture trade? (Apollo Magazine)

While the modern style has stayed the same forever - people still have Eames chairs and Bauhaus chairs or whatever - because it's all about functionality and use and iconicism, the 'traditional' goes through huge fads almost in cycles. (papermag.com)

See the 30s Tudoresque vision of Merrie England, with a lot of brass and oak. It was a debased form of the late 19th century Arts and Crafts, and the fad for vast refectory tables and carved wooden chests. Late 19th century Louis IV revival (baroque, rococo) ended up as flimsy reproduction furniture and would-be Aubusson carpets: pensioner chic.

More here, and links to the rest.

Beat the Heat, Beat the Cold 5

Renoir was a fan

Alan Davies is as unstarry as it gets when he turns up at a north London cafe with his greying hair cut short and his coat zipped up against the cold. He asks the staff very politely if they could turn the heating on, but when they can’t work out how to do it he suffers in silence rather than strop like a diva. (Daily Mail interview with Alan Davies)

Caro Stow-Crat opines:
In this hot weather, I use a paper fan I bought in China Town, and I got some lovely electric fans in the pound shop. Living in a draughty old historic house can be an advantage.

Can I just point out, though, that if you wear trousers, skirt or dress made of thin material, thong panties are perhaps not the perfect base layer?

There are no social rules any more – but what about queueing and correct use of the checkout divider? Yesterday a young man let me go in front of him in the checkout queue – what a gent!

Never comment on what other people are eating, even if they’re on the “clean, paleo, detox” diet and longing to tell you all about it.

I'm sure none of you would do this: You bring a bottle of the kind of wine you like (very dry, ready chilled) to a party. The host/hostess puts it to one side and never opens it, and gives you a glass of warm chardonnay.

And don’t forget Miss Manners’ good advice: If you know your IQ score, don’t tell anybody.

Upper-middle-class Upwards frown on sitting next to an electric fan when it’s hot. They’re not quite sure if they’re allowed to own one. What about the planet? And besides, fans are a) too pleasant and b) too practical. In earlier decades, Upwards never approved of sitting too close to a fire, or the TV.

As a teenager, I got on a bus on the hottest day of the year. Opposite me on the bench seat were three ladies in thick woollen overcoats. Sweltering, I opened a window. They frowned and said, “Are you warm? We are not!”

In an office with no opening windows, turning on the aircon can be perilous. Sometimes it gets turned off because "draughts give you flu".


Etiquette in general
Some people imagine etiquette is all about this kind of thing: "As at dinner, it is the duty of a hostess to give the signal for leaving the room, which she does by attracting the attention of the lady of highest rank present by means of a smile and a bow, rising at the same time from her seat." The same site gives rituals for arranging your train over one arm correctly when attending a vice-regal drawing-room.

Anyone harking back to the “simpler” days of the 1950s has got it all wrong… Amy Vanderbilt’s Everyday Etiquette… offers advice of enormous complexity on issues such as, should a gentleman always remove his hat in an elevator? (Alexandra Frean in The Times) Miss Manners (Judith Martin) was asked the same question by a polite fellow who said he would like to remove his hat, but then what do you do with it? Miss Manners suggested he clutch it lightly to his chest. She also hoped that a few remarks about the weather to a lady lift-sharer might lead to a cup of coffee and – who knows?

“The unreal set of manners and bizarre systems of etiquette that they force themselves to follow, like our own upper classes.” (New Humanist) OK the poshos have some odd codes, like tilting your soup bowl away from you and not wearing black stockings in the country, or any jewellery but pearls before dusk, but they’re not really as bizarre as people imagine.

Middle-class unwritten rules are far weirder. Writer John Mortimer had a schoolfriend to stay, who at the end of the holiday remarked: "I'll tell you something about your father. He can't see. He's blind, isn't he?" Mortimer comments: "It was a question our family never asked. Naturally, I didn't answer."

You didn’t raise your voice in public, because you didn’t want to attract attention to yourself, and you didn’t want everybody to “know your business”. Some older people are still a bit shocked at others talking loudly in public. Upwards and Weybridges even kept the radio or gramophone turned down low.

Women used to be warned against “clanking” jewellery and “squeaking” shoes – circa 1880. Were you supposed to glide silently? Rustling taffeta petticoats were probably out, too. (It was fashionable to wear several very long chains, and multiple brooches. How did you stop them “clanking”?) Your voice was supposed to be soft, gentle and low as well. This got transferred to jangling charm bracelets when these became fashionable in the 1940s and 50s.

More temperature tips here, and links to the rest.
More etiquette here.

The Upwards: Update

What comes across... is the charmed, lazy life of overpaid Oxford academics – the short hours, endless long vacations and sabbaticals, the high-table boozing, international conferences, holidays to sponge off the Cecils, the Spenders... the general unaccountability. (The Times on Iris Murdoch’s letters.)

The upper-middle-class Upwards think it’s OK to make cracks about people who breathe through their mouths, can’t do joined up writing, and eat at Harvesters. They are far the most snobbish of the classes. I knew a woman who judged boyfriends by their mothers' curtains.

Upwards hate “celebrities” because they are celebrated for success in common fields like football, pop music, reality TV and Hollywood movies. Also they make a lot of money. Upwards resent popular culture, because it’s evidence that they aren't the only people here. They like to say that “vacuous celebrities” are celebrated for doing things that don’t take talent or hard work. But then they manage not to “see” stage schools, or footballers in training. Unfortunately writing literary novels or even acting in Shakespeare will never get Upwards anything like the media exposure. And they aren’t allowed to go on X Factor.

They like to think that they have chosen their friends, and that they aren’t a “type”. They're very touchy about being classified or given a label (hipster, chatterati). Some of them like to say that if everyone stopped talking about class it would disappear. They’re not aware that databases like Mosaic ("consumer classification for consistent cross-channel marketing) are dividing us into finer and finer categories so that people can sell things to us (they’d be outraged).

Upward grandparents are the ones who worry about the whole family sliding down the social scale.
Fifty years ago, Upwards and Stow-Crats told their children that certain things were Done and others were Not Done. No further explanation needed. If you drank wine out of a tumbler or ate peas with your knife, in no time at all you'd find yourself living in the kitchen, using an old newspaper as a tablecloth, and pouring milk into your tea straight from the bottle. And you'd probably be dropped from polite society.

Upwards don't become aldermen, they sneer at them, also at Freemasons, Rotarians and Roundtablers, who have worked out a way of having a social life while doing something useful. The Upward equivalent is the book group, the poetry workshop, the writing circle, the music weekend - and that’s about it. They aren’t very organised about meeting people and making new friends – perhaps because they are terrified of mixing with the Wrong People. They shudder at “public speaking”, but if required to do a book tour they may take lessons in "presentation skills" from an out-of-work actor.

Middle-middle-class Weybridges celebrate English culture – change-ringing, topiary, battle re-enactments, Morris dancing, narrowboats. Upwards are keen on preserving working-class culture once it’s safely in the past – see the current fad for plaid shirts and distressed wood.

More here.

The Teales: Update

Miles and Juliet lived in a neat circumscribed executive estate in Pangbourne and did everything right. They bought every possession (including the right opinions) that the young executive should have and their lives were organised with a degree of foresight that made the average Soviet Five-Year-Plan look impetuous. (Star Trap, Simon Brett)

The lower-middle class Teales, Jen and Bryan, and their children Christine and Wayne, are admirable. They join Rotary and become aldermen. They are hard-working, sensible and organised. They are also conscientious, kind and polite, but they can be scrupulous and judgemental. Teale respectability may be a relic of the Low Protestant sects their grandparents grew up in. The attitudes lived on while the chapels were converted into flats.

There used to be some Teales who would never discuss other people in any way. It made talking to them quite difficult. Was it  Protestantism forbidding “all uncharitableness”? Jen always knows when to stop talking for the two minutes silence, and when the clocks go back/forward. Poor Samantha Upward is always being caught out, and frowned on.

Jen retrained as an aromatherapist when the children became "adults". Christine is a wedding planner, Wayne a cosmetic surgeon. (Downmarket Sharon Definitely runs a nail bar.) Aromatherapy fell out of fashion, and Jen now helps Christine with her wedding business, thinking up elaborate, “unique” and expensive additions for your “special day”.

The early 60s were so Teale! They smelled of face powder, Yardley lipstick and lavender. Then it all went wrong and we were forced to whiff of patchouli and avoid ironing our clothes. Thank goodness the 70s brought the Teales back: American tan tights, A-line mini skirts, man-made fibres. Long hair parted in the middle became a symbol of conformity rather than rebellion as long as it was “healthy and shining” and went with over-plucked eyebrows, highlighter on the brow bone and a vapid smile.

Jen folds letters very neatly, lining up the edges and pressing down the folds. When her colleague Sam makes a mess of something she says: “I got carried away!” Teales, especially co-workers, take the Upward “scatty act” at face value, and are very disapproving.

But even Teales have their dark side. When not holidaying at nudist camps, they join suburban covens.

Picture by Versluys and Uittenbroek.

More here.

The Stow-Crats: Update

The Stow-Crats, Harry and Caroline, are very self-deprecating — they can afford to be.

Poor Lady Lucan! The TV audience found her “cold”, and thought it incomprehensible that she’d had no contact with her children for 35 years. She said: “I bumped into George once in a park. We didn’t say much.” George is her son. Her abusive husband provoked her into emotional outbursts and filmed them as evidence that she was “unstable”, so that he could get a divorce and custody of the chidren. She made it clear that people of her class weren’t allowed to experience or show emotion of any kind. It was redefined as madness. (This was clearly a shock to people who are used to reality TV, and interviewees breaking down in tears on cue.)

From a Times obituary, 2014: After a rackety youth on the continent gambling and having affairs, she settled down. Her husband had to teach her how to make a cup of tea. When she moved into a flat, she wondered why it was so cold – she didn’t realise you have to turn radiators on.

It used to be the thing for Stow-Crats and Weybridges to despise all foreigners, while Bohemian Upwards fawned on them.

More here.

You Are What You Eat 10

Coffee shops, ranked by poshness:
Percy Ingle 
Greggs
Costa
Starbucks
Nero
Pret 
"Oh we've got this little independent place we go to."
(@JonnElledge)

Although, oddly, Upwards don't go to independent bakers...

Well, my 8am has been all about kicking a deflated football around a playground & trying to fight off a herring gull from my brioches. (@_katherine_may_ She can even name the species of gull.)

I'm not saying this campsite is middle class but some girls cycled by extolling the virtues of the 'duck vegan wrap' they had for lunch, the man in the next tent has a coffee grinder and one of the children, when asked during the Bushcraft session what food they are allergic to, replied 'Sushi'! (ABS)

The surgeon told me that there were three types of knife/finger accidents: the oyster-opening one, the avocado one, and the separating-two-frozen-burgers one. A paradigm of the British class system perhaps? (Letter to Guardian, April 2017)

Middle-class problems. You are at a friend’s and they grill some halloumi and offer you some. Do you accept politely and spoil your dinner? Are they going to produce more food later? Do they think a few pieces of grilled halloumi is an adequate dinner?

Middle-class problems. A friend invites you round, and says she’ll cook. (This is not “being invited to dinner”.) There are several other people there, and you drink wine and chat for hours, and then she cooks some noodles mixed with ONE cut-up fried courgette for the six of you. You get home at midnight and make cheese on toast.

Middle-class problems. You go to some evening “do”, like a talk or the opening of a picture show. There is wine, and trays of very superior nibbles, tasty but tiny and you only get a handful. Do you suggest to a friend that you go and get a pizza somewhere, or is this supposed to be dinner? If it is, can you grab a whole plate of chicken goujons?

Middle-class problems. The same thing happens at weddings: how do you make an adequate lunch out of tiny sandwiches and mini-quiches? Plus, you lose count of how many you’ve eaten. Is there or isn’t there going to be a sit-down meal at 3pm? On the way home, you eat walnut cake at a garden centre because you are starving.

Middle class problems. You go to a café with a lovely menu full of fashionable food and vegetarian options. But the shredded red cabbage comes in tiny chips, in a ramekin, without dressing, so there is nothing to stick it together. You try to eat it out of the ramekin, but it falls off the fork and you only get a few tiny fragments at a time. Do you tip out the ramekin onto your plate and ask for a spoon, or give up? There is some baby spinach and rocket as well – a few leaves to make the plate look covered, splashed with a very hot mustard dressing that you want to avoid. The pastry on the vegetarian dumplings is so hard you can’t cut it with the very blunt knife provided. It slips and the rocket goes everywhere. You try to eat a rocket leaf but it is too big and sticks out of your mouth, making you look like a manatee browsing on seaweed. You yearn for the days of risotto or chicken supreme, where you got a bowlful of small bits of stuff in mush. You didn’t have to cut anything up, it all stuck together, and every mouthful was the same. And it was pale beige. And FILLING.

Middle class problems. You go out to a posh restaurant where every course is “plated” – a tiny stack of stuff amid smears and blobs of sauce. As soon as you try to eat any of it, it falls apart. It amounts to about three mouthfuls and there’s no way of scooping up any of the sauce. The other diners don’t mind because they eat biscuits and cake all day and are never hungry. Dining at expensive restaurants is just a performance.

When I went to university I was surprised to find that the canteen served “tea”, ie supper, from 5, and shut at 7. I went a few times on my own (I like stodge followed by trifle), but girls didn’t go – it was all groups of boys. When – and what – did the girls eat? We had kitchens, but I never saw anybody cooking in one. I moved in the second term to some converted US airforce barracks and had the communal kitchen to myself. The canteen was working class (though I met friends for lunch there), and there were a couple of middle-class coffee shops – literally on a higher level. I think people sold sandwiches in the student union, and there was a supermarket. And when the very classy Sainsbury Centre opened we Art History students ate lunch there in the lovely restaurant nearly every day. You could get a cheap cheese roll at the Chaplaincy, and there was a burger bar on an even lower level than the canteen. We got a free (fried) breakfast at our converted airfield but again – girls didn’t go, and eventually I got the message. There was a bar at the airfield too, but I never went there either.

From Facebook: Whenever I use the automatic checkout machines and walk away I feel guilty as if I haven't actually paid... (Combines Upward love of needless guilt with Upward obsession about purchasing behaviour. See the Upward who feels guilty saying “Nothing to declare” when he has nothing to declare.)

More here, and links to the rest.

What to Wear 6

Airport chic

Class is dead, long live class.

The Times (March 16 2017) says that being thrown off a plane for wearing leggings all depends on the class of the wearer. The piece unveils a world of brand names, over-priced athleisure and being “upgraded to business class”. “We dressed for the seats we wanted – smart, unfaded jeans, with a plain but reasonably expensive T shirt, blazer and pair of Gucci loafers. I was convinced the loafers would swing it.”
It’s clear that "cattle class" exists to make business class seem more desirable. “Airport chic – there is no dress code less clear... Context is everything – and that context is usually the class of the person wearing the clothes.”

Apparently Claridges forbids ripped jeans in its restaurant – unless you’re a fashion editor. And you can dress like an Essex boy on a flight as long as you’re a “millionaire model”. WAGs and models wear athleisure to travel but every item is a brand and their yoga pants cost £300. They are “all too easily confused with the underclass” but thanks to their height and slimness “this rarely happens”.
Those who normally fly business class for work wear “skinny jeans, blazer or leather jacket and big scarf”. Who knew travel was so complicated and exhausting?

Of course hipster fashion is “American blue-collar chic”, in the same way that hippies dressed up as pioneers and Native Americans. (American blue-collar chic really is chic, though, in that US “if it ain’t broke” way.) My smart designer denim jeans are based on the work clothes of an American miner in the Gold Rush, and are worn with a striped T shirt that references sailors’ garb of the same period. My woollen “cardigan jacket” was designed for sporty lady golfers of the 1900s. A very expensive dress in fake patchwork is even more decadent.

In the 70s, lower middle-class Teales did not wear pink, they wore brown and blue. They were very shocked when I turned up at university with short black punk hair, and pink-framed sunglasses.

It was quite a milestone when people of my generation started wearing suits. But it seemed like selling out. We thought we’d be wearing purple velvet loons for ever.

Posh Caro and Samantha are secretly rather pleased that the UKIP spokeswoman is wearing a purple acetate blouse. It just shows, doesn’t it?

The conservative clothes of those papist families who seem to conflate Catholicism with corduroy trousers. (Catherine Nixey, Times Feb 2017)

Most parents had to make do with generic kids clothing from the high street until... (The Times being staggeringly snobbish in July 2016.)

More here, and links to the rest.