There's crusty bread, England beating Germany at soccer, Forsyte Saga on telly, corner shops full of chat, steam engines, doctors making house calls, an Austin A35 in your driveway, Sam Kydd in his hundredth movie, empty roads, beckoning beaches, trustworthy bobbies, rosy-cheeked milkmen, newspapers without swear words.
Someone on The Goon Show prophetically saying: It's great to be alive - in nineteen fifty-five.
Now you remember. Wonderful. Truly golden. Whoops, I've forgotten one thing: queues (US: lines).
Queues encircling cinemas, queues (in effect) standing in train corridors, sitting-down queues in doctor's waiting rooms, outside fish-and-chip shops, for cheese, for bacon, for fireworks, for going in, for coming out. Definitely the Golden Age of Queues.
Computers? Wouldn't have one in the house. I remember when you waited an hour to renew a car disc. When you saw the main feature film minus ten minutes. When buying half a pound of butter took quarter of an hour. When you "booked" a long-distance call to Liverpool. When you didn't know How? or When? and had to wait a whole weekend to find out.
I read that physicists rarely cite gold illustratively because gold isn't atomically interesting. Tell you what: add me to that long queue of physicists.
WIP Second Hand (Still 47,571 words.
I’ve been blogging like mad)
“It won’t be good news.” Francine shook her head vigorously. “What am I saying? It’s your house. Forget what I said.”
“Not if it worries you. But I think I need to know why.”
“Let me see outside.” Francine got up, created a tiny gap between the curtains. “Hell and damnation. A Morgan in the driveway.”
“Is that significant?” asked Jennie.
“My past life come to haunt me.”
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ReplyDeleteAs a war baby I still have an aversion to queuing which could be diagnosed as an illness.
ReplyDeleteA chill quivered through me at the memory of those doctor’s surgery queues, the smells, the fetid atmosphere, the cliché ridden conversation, and, at your peril, failing to ask who was the last person to enter so that you secured your rightful turn, and then you came out with something worse than you went in with.
What about the the dawning of the new age with The Festival of Britain, The Skylon, and that gimcrack furniture made from steel tubing and compressed sawdust laminate boarding?
I presume your novel is set in modern times, but the Morgan most likely looks much the same as the ones being produced in The Golden Age, although they have updated recently with more space age designs which I was unaware of until I was motivated to search their website by your post. I read a recent review of the current “traditional” model and it was panned as an excruciating driving experience.
Sir Hugh: Ironically the conventional Morgan, which looks as though it was designed in the thirties, and was, is unsuited to anything but perfectly flat tarmac. The suspension is far far too hard.
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