They Don't Make Them Like That Any More

Being at heart a trivial person, I read with great interest an article in yesterday's Telegraph about a book on the Royal Family that has just been published. 

Although trivial, I am not persistent. If gossip is put in front of me, I lap it up, but I don't go out of my way to find it (well, I did once - when living in Vienna, learning German, I bought a very downmarket magazine that published a transcript of a conversation Prince Charles had on the telephone with Camilla Parker-Bowles; I told myself I did this purely in order to practise my German; I certainly ended up happy that I had read the ghastly exchange through the filter of a foreign language; even with the slight muffling of meaning that comes from having to look up lots of words while reading, it was a pretty sordid exchange that still makes me wince when I think of it).

Anyway, I haven't followed Windsor family business assiduously enough to have been aware that a person called "Porchie" (Lord Porchester to those who did not know him) had at one stage been a very close friend of the Queen.

As soon as I learned of his existence, however, I wanted to get a look at him, and so I began combing the internet for his image. In about 25 seconds I came upon this picture, taken by Robert Jackson. The man on the left, walking beside the Queen is "Porchie". He looks adorable.

But whether or not he looked adorable no longer interested me because I had become riveted by the picture itself. Looking at it, I saw the world I was born into and I realised that every vestige of it has been swept away.

The things that make me nostalgic about the scene are myriad but probably right at the very top of the list is the utter lack of commercialisation visible anywhere and the complete nonchalance of the other racegoers about the fact that the Queen is only feet away.

What happened to women like the one in the hat seen here striding forward? She has either just seen her horse win and is off to collect her winnings, or she is going to find her husband to command him to hand over another 10 bob. For what it's worth, I think he is called Reggie, and I imagine he may be hiding, downing a stiff gin and enjoying a break from that masterful personality with whom he has signed up to a lifetime of marriage.

And what became of all the women like the one glimpsed side-on behind the determined strider? She has a strong resemblance to Edna Everage in her original Moonee Ponds iteration

And there is another of her ilk in the left-hand corner of this part of the picture.

No one is fat, everyone is dressed well. They all have proper shoes on - that alone is extremely rare now. I know this for a fact, because I have lately developed the habit of counting the number of people I see when I go out who are not wearing factory-made sports shoes - and the numbers are invariably close to zero.

Are things better in our new era? Or simply different? Is my sadness at losing the circumstances of life one can see a bit of in this picture simply due to the fact that what I see here is the world of my childhood and I liked that world simply because being a child is a time that, at least in retrospect, seems rather less exhausting than being an adult?

I do have a distrust of change and what is claimed to be progress, but I think that distrust is not unreasonable. I believe that a time when people made shoes with craftsmanship rather than industrial machinery and plastic extrusions was not only more stylish but more pleasant for those engaged in the shoemaking - and this applied more generally.  Whatever the economics of smallscale manufacturing, I am convinced the social good of working in a skilled job, making or mending things, was considerable. Being apprenticed to learn a trade meant becoming a person who had mastered something. Leaving school now, the closest most young people will come to a job where they feel they are slowly learning a trade is getting a barista certificate. 

Of course back then it was virtually impossible to get a decent cup of coffee in Britain. Eating out was also not much done. By today's standards, things were frightfully dull and boring. All the same, I sometimes I wonder if things haven't now become a bit too exciting. I feel that I am bombarded with distracting novelty to the extent that novelty has become faintly addictive. Slow and steady activities like reading, thinking, maybe even making something seem, by contrast, to take too long.

By the way, can you guess when the picture was taken? I couldn't. I assumed it must have been about 1960 or '61, but a picture from the same day is labelled as being taken on 30th September 1969. Astonishing to realise that even then the old ways hadn't been entirely swept away.