Buying Someone a Fondue Set: The Gift that Doesn’t Keep on Giving
Some gifts for the kitchen are certain to languish at the back of the cupboard. The pasta machine, the linchpin of a gruelling procedure that leaves you wondering why you didn’t just buy a packet of the dried stuff. The mandolin – an appallingly dangerous implement unless it’s put well out of reach of humans. The steamer. The ravioli tray. And the fondue set.
The seventies saw us attempt to embrace this curious Swiss dining habit, because it was supposedly fun, communal and slightly exotic. But it was also curiously unsatisfying. Fondue only came into existence because of the harsh Swiss winters rendering bread stale, and cheese too hard to do anything but melt it down – but we fetishized this peasant meal and turned it into a themed evening. Once. Because fondue is a nightmare: it’s messy, it’s fraught with issues of etiquette (the double dip, the licking of the fork), it can lead to unpleasant stomach ache if you drink anything cold, and it fails to tick several nutritional boxes. So the gear goes back in the cupboard, in favour of knives, forks, plates, and boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce. Much better.
Breaking Down Social Barriers with a Game of Twister
While Ideal and MB Games were making games of “nerve and skill” like Mousetrap and Connect 4, Hasbro brought us Twister, a terrifying test of embarrassment thresholds. The adverts showed groups of people squealing with joy as the spinner instructed them to put their right foot on blue, or left hand on yellow, their limbs entwining and bodies interlocking as necessary. Presumably there are millions of uninhibited people who had fun, but many will have been mentally scarred by its use as a social icebreaker.
Office parties could become dramatic scenes of emotional torture, as an unwilling participant would find their head squashed against the plastic sheet by the arse of Maureen from the typing pool – only for her to unpredictably and tragically break wind. Twister is now spoken of with a nudge and a wink as synonymous with swingers’ sex parties, while we’ve moved on to play games online that don’t even require us to be in the same country, let alone accidentally touch each other’s nipples.
Whatever you do, don’t point at rainbows
Sometimes we’re blessed with good luck. At other times things go incredibly badly and we end up with our head stuck between some railings. Humankind has always been eager to work out why it is that some people don’t get their head stuck between the railings and others do, and it’s unlikely that this curiosity will ever dissipate; as a time-saving all-purpose solution, people will continue to offer generic prayers to those celestial beings that supposedly control our destiny, but they’ll also be developing incredibly complex rituals of superstitious behaviour in a miserable attempt to micro-manage any runs of bad luck.
For example, we know that ships sometimes sink, and planes sometimes crash. But for some reason, the 1970s saw a fanciful theory from a decade earlier – namely that one particular triangular expanse of ocean between Puerto Rico, Florida and Bermuda was terribly dangerous – take an iron grip on the public imagination. Three books, published between 1969 and 1974, whipped up speculation about its inherent dangers, and had people nervously consulting maps lest their Caribbean cruises venture anywhere near it.
Which they invariably did, because one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes passes through it. Nearly all of the ships made it out. Some planes went through it, too. Nearly all of them landed. The ones that didn’t were probably victims of unpredictable weather associated with the region, and probably not, as was thought by some, down to malfunctioning technology from the lost city of Atlantis. Insurers researched the phenomenon; they concluded that it was no more dangerous than any other triangle. Barry Manilow, bless him, immortalized it in song. “Bermuda Triangle,” he sang, “it makes people disappear. Bermuda Triangle, don’t go too near.” But steering clear of the Bermuda Triangle was as ludicrous as not going outside because that’s where car accidents happen. Few people worry too much about the Bermuda Triangle any more.
Superstition is generally founded on this kind of unscientific analysis of past events, and using that analysis to attempt to explain what’ll happen next. In the past, we have believed that if children pick dandelions, they’ll wet the bed, and if you put a pair of bellows on a table, there’ll be a fight. Now, it’s possible – or even certain – that children have wet the bed after picking dandelions, because children sometimes wet the bed, and they sometimes pick dandelions. Similarly, it’s statistically probable that fights will have taken place within sight of a pair of bellows and a table, but it’s unlikely that the bellows had much to do with it, unless they were a particularly gorgeous pair of bellows whose ownership was subject to a long-running debate.
Here are a few more confused examples of cause and effect that we’ve embraced in the past: If you sweep under a woman’s chair, she’ll never marry; if you turn a loaf of bread upside down, there’ll be a shipwreck; if you smell your own feet, you won’t get cramp; if you close a door that opens by itself, you’ll be the first person in the room to die; if you split a sapling in half and pass someone through it, naked, three times at daybreak, it’ll help them to recover from their hernia; if you look at mushrooms they’ll stop growing; if you get a child to ride on the back of a bear it’ll be cured of whooping cough; if you crush an eggshell it’ll stop a witch being able to use it as a boat; and so on.
Similarly, while meeting an elephant or shaking the hand of a chimney sweep has been said to be incredibly lucky, the list of activities that has supposedly heralded the arrival of bad news is way, way longer: carrying bees across water; laying eyes upon a white mole; dreaming of shoes; sharing a towel; buying a broom in May; saving the life of a drowning man; cutting your nails on a Friday; picking up a left-handed glove; pointing at rainbows…
It’s easy to look back and laugh at any number of these, and wonder what on earth we were thinking. But our descendants will look back at us and scoff at the fact that we still avoid walking under ladders, or pay more attention than necessary to the fact that a black cat has just strolled casually across our path. But by that point, they’ll have developed their own equally ludicrous patterns of behaviour, such as never recharging their robot on a Monday. Plus ça change.
Attempting to Produce your Own Simulacrum of Commercially Available Soft Drinks
Towards the end of the decade, kids suddenly became wildly excited about something that had been invented some 75 years earlier, which is unusual in itself. The “apparatus for aerating liquids” was originally marketed by gin distillers W & A Gilbey as a luxury item for well-to-do households who wanted their cold drinks to have that extra pizzazz. But for some reason it took a few decades for them to identifiy their target market and have a hit with SodaStream – possibly the only kitchen gadget that shifted millions of units through pester power.
Children like fizzy drinks. They like them so much that they’ll blow air down a straw in the forlorn hope that it’ll carbonate their orange squash; as we all know, this doesn’t work for all kinds of scientific reasons. SodaStream did work on the bubbles front – but there was a problem. Kids consume so many cans of fizzy pop that they’re virtually connoisseurs. They know fake Coca-Cola when they taste it. And so the gadget that they’d yearned for for months gradually lost its appeal, as we all remembered that there are some things – like cornflakes and combine harvesters – that it’s best not to try making yourself.
Keeping a Pet Rock
The success story of the Pet Rock in 1975 is even more remarkable when you consider that people could have made their own for next-to-nothing. But Gary Dahl somehow persuaded people that his were more authentic; some five million rocks from Rosarito Beach in Mexico were given a pair of googly eyes, sold to delighted customers at $3.95 a pop, and given pride of place on mantlepieces everywhere.
It came with a comical manual – “place it on some old newspapers; the rock will never know what the paper is for, and will require no further instructions�
�� – but many people truly loved their rocks. Psychological studies have shown that pets can improve our mental well-being, but the eagerness with which humans anthropomorphized a lump of stone and lavished their affections upon it took Dahl completely by surprise. It also begat a spate of copycat products that desperately tried to sell something dirt cheap and ultimately useless at a massive mark-up, but nothing came close to the profit margins earned by the Pet Rock.
Relieving Stress Via some Primal Screaming
Arthur Janov published his first book, The Primal Scream, in 1970. He believed that neuroses could be resolved and treated by re-awakening pain that you may have suppressed since childhood, and re-experiencing that pain within a controlled environment. In return for money, naturally. Primal therapy wasn’t all about screaming, but the title of his book has left us with images of people having gone away for grim weekends where they’d spend hours rolling around the floor in the foetal position , wailing loudly; these days you could have a weekend at the seaside for a fraction of the cost, half the trauma, and about the same degree of improvement in mental health.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono loved it. But since the 1970s it has been widely criticized as offering no benefit beyond placebo – unless you value slight hoarseness and a hankering for a lozenge. Depressingly for Janov, the most lasting legacy could be said to be the music of Tears For Fears, whose name and a number of lyrics were inspired by his writings. When the band met Janov in the mid-1980s, they were said to be disappointed by how “Hollywood” he was, and they showed little interest in his suggestion that they write a musical.
Getting Fit using a Massive Motorized Elastic Band
As we become lazier and more spherical, we become increasingly seduced by the of idea shedding excess flab without breaking a sweat. We search high and low for solutions that act upon us, without us having to do anything other than standing still, or preferably sitting or even lying still. Massage belts (or “electro arse-band dewobblifiers”, to give them their scientific name) looked like the reassembly of the internal components of a washing machine into a catapult-like harness; by standing in a variety of positions, parts of your body would be vigorously pummelled by the rubber sheet, while anyone watching would picture the lazy chubster being sent pinging majestically through the nearest bay window.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the cardio-vascular benefits of being shaken about a bit are virtually non-existent, and while there may have been some toning of the muscles, the health improvements were more mental than physical – that is “well, at least I’m doing something.” The massage belt now forms the lower strata of decades of home exercise equipment thrown into landfill, while magic pills and power plates continue to tease us with the possibility of losing weight fast. But we’re wiser now. Aren’t we?
Relieving the Monotony of Sporting Events by Streaking
The winter of 1973–74 saw the practice of running around in public places with no clothes on become strangely popular across student campuses in the USA. On 7 March 1974, the record for the largest group streak was set by 1543 assertive, confident young students at the University of Georgia; four weeks later a Mr Robert Opel nudely interrupted David Niven during the Academy Awards ceremony, and the phenomenon began to spread globally.
Michael O’Brien cut a Christ-like figure during his naked sprint at an England rugby international in April 1974; Michael Angelow straddled the stumps during an Ashes Test Match the following summer, and by the time Erica Roe completed her topless streak at another rugby match in 1982, the police helmet had been firmly established as the modern-day fig leaf. The streakers’ motivation? Women have tended to do well financially out of their escapades; blokes did it more as an act of drunken defiance. But as more sporting events were interrupted by people desperately seeking fame, TV companies started cutting away and showing uninteresting areas of grass in order to dissuade them, and today streaking is seen more as a worrying symbol of inadequate security than a much-needed livening-up of the on-field action.
Having a Portrait of a Reigning Monarch on your Crockery
These days it seems like a strange way to express one’s patriotism; to buy mugs or plates that prominently feature the head of the reigning monarch, and then either noisily slurp tea from an area just above their crown, or dump some fish and chips squarely on their face and leave it smeared with the congealing remains of a dollop of tomato ketchup. But as Britain roared its approval during the summer of the Queen’s silver jubilee in 1977, it was almost seen as your civic duty to purchase a set of commemorative crockery.
It’s interesting to ponder where all these millions of pieces of kitchenware have disappeared to. Unearthing one in your garage or your loft has people peering at them in awe; even a mug commemorating the imminent wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer – with a suitable saccharine portrait – seems like something from another century. Oh, it is. You could put it down to declining patriotism or a disinterest in the monarchy, but millions proudly waved the flag for the Queen’s golden jubilee. They just didn’t want a mug.
Laughing Uproariously at Borderline Racist Sitcoms
History continues to throw up appalling examples of racism, and while whole nations (naming no names) have considered such attitudes to be a great idea at the time, they don’t really belong in a slightly frivolous book such as this one. Mild racism masquerading as teatime entertainment, however, is something that has, thankfully, been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Programmes such as Till Death Us Do Part, Love Thy Neighbour (dealing with the reactions of a white couple to a black couple moving in next door) and Curry And Chips, featuring a blacked-up Spike Milligan as a Pakistani factory worker in conflict with his colleagues, weren’t written by racists – indeed, the white characters were invariably portrayed as the ignorant and bigoted ones. But the most overtly racist language often got the biggest laughs, and many black or Asian people found that language being hurled back at them on the street. It’s almost impossible to watch sections of these programmes today without covering ones eyes and wincing slightly, and that embarrassment we feel is a measure of how attitudes have changed over the last forty years.
Paying to Roller-skate for Three Hours Around an Ovoid Rink
Ice-skating conjures up a picture of a couple gliding effortlessly around a sparkling rink, performing triple toe loops and double salkos while wearing glinting, inscrutable smiles. Roller disco, however, has very different images associated with it: groups of teenagers, clumsily galumphing their way around an ovoid expanse of floor, eyes wide, arms stuck out in front of them (just in case), the clack and thud of the skates all but drowning out the sound of “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” by Baccara. Elegance isn’t the first word that springs to mind.
This wasn’t anything to do with dancing. It was more like going for an unsteady walk. Of course, the American sport of roller derby was basically a test of endurance as people roller-skated around a circuit for hours on end, but combining it with popular music created a social occasion – first for kids to meet each other, then fall over each other, and then pick each other up off the floor, if they were lucky. Roller-disco has been re-emerging of late, but it shouldn’t be long before it’s popped back into the time capsule.
Putting One’s Keys in a Bowl at a Party for Someone Other than One’s Wife to Fish Out
The free-and-easy partner-swapping that’s supposed to have taken place in middle-class suburbia during the 1970s was only ever something that happened to other people, in the same way that those university campuses that were supposedly a hotbed of promiscuity were actually full of socially inhibited students writing bad poetry.
But key parties helped the trend along, if indeed it occurred at all; couples put their keys in a bowl, crossed their fingers and hoped fervently for the best. The women picked out a bunch of keys, and then spent a short period of time engaging in embarrassed, disappointing sex with whoever owned the keys in question. The 1997 film The Ice Stor
m, starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver, depicted this kind of thing going on in Connecticut in 1973, and while such parties are commonly thought of as being risqué, thrilling and oodles of fun, it was probably exactly like this film – a bitter cauldron of jealousy and recrimination. You might think monogamy is boring, but at least it doesn’t leave you with a venereal disease, and a nagging, unpleasant memory of the grimacing face of some bloke you barely know called Jim.
Decorating Walls with Pictures Made out of Nails and String
Humans have hung some pretty unpleasant things on their walls over the centuries, from animal heads to neatly framed Victorian cartoons where a greengrocer compliments a well-endowed female customer for having an “enormous pear”. The tasteful choice during the 1970s, however, was nail and string art. Get a board. Cover it in felt – black, for the most sophisticated results; hammer nails into it in a geometrically pleasing pattern, and then wind silver thread around the nails to create a matrix of geometric miserablism.
These things didn’t look like anything in particular. They weren’t meant to. But while it’s possible to derive a certain amount of enjoyment from their regularity and neatness, you could say the same about a ball bearing. Spirograph was the parallel for the younger generation; again, you were able to make “art” without any discernable talent other than an ability to follow some instructions. There were more wall-mounted horrors to follow in the 1980s, but it’s a relief to know that the austere white wall won the day eventually.
Attempt to Create an Etch-A-Sketch Masterpiece
Who knows how many promising young artists have had their ambition clobbered out of them by the sheer frustration of being unable to draw anything on the silvery Etch-A-Sketch screen, except perhaps a staircase viewed from side-on, or a primitive television set. Which is precisely what the Etch-A-Sketch looked like. Turn one knob for a horizontal line, the other for vertical, and both together – slowly and exceptionally carefully – to produce a diagonal line. The achievement of drawing a circle was something akin to watchmaking or defusing explosives. The only satisfying aspect of the toy was the ease with which you could erase your miserable efforts and either start again or, more likely, quietly kick the thing under the bed.
The Next Big Thing Page 12