Tuesday 12 March 2019

The Seventies

The other day The Seventies tweeted that they were looking forward to getting the British Kite mark back.  I was confused.  First of all, who knew a decade could tweet? Also, I was pretty sure that although we use the CE (European mark) for most things the kite mark is still on things like door locks, where our standards are different although I'm not sure if they are better or worse.   Anyway, these are the delights we have to look forward to in a post Brexit world after the MPs have their second meaningless vote tonight and we leave the EU with a deal or something else happens.

Just as this vote is happening there will be a documentary on the TV where someone tells Jacob Rees Mogg that his investment company has earnt him £7 million since the EU referendum and he looks genuinely surprised.  I wonder how much money you have to have not to notice £7million extra in your bank account. His response to tonight's vote is to quote from Mozart's Requiem (it probably means something in Latin but I'm a musician). You can, though, see why he's not worried about a 'no-deal Brexit'.

The world is seriously bonkers at the moment.  I think it needs therapy.  I could recommend a good therapist but I don't think it would be fair to her.

Even the weather is confused.  We had summer last week and now we've got those storms we normally get in October.  This one, we are calling Gareth, which I think is a proper Seventies name. He probably has a moustache, has hair down to his shoulders and a tight curled perm.  His flares are blowing in the wind and he is thinking about pulling his sheepskin coat over his chest, which is currently exposed as his flowery shirt has the top four buttons undone to reveal his hairy chest and medallion.

When people first voted for Brexit they were excited about returning us to a post war era of rationing, drab clothes, women in the kitchen in their pinnies and men wearing bowler hats to work.  The 1950s seemed to be the decade we hankered after.  Maybe someone pointed out the lack of curry or pizza but suddenly we've conveniently skipped the swinging sixties and landed in the Seventies as our dream decade.

I had a bit of a flashback to the Seventies at the weekend.  The last storm, Freya, caused some damage and the local newspaper reported "Freja blows off roofs."
"Ummmm," I thought, "Someone's going to be in trouble.  Wait til teacher sees that.  That'll get a smack." My nine year old inner child was torn between being a goody-goody for spotting the error and being horrified at the future fate of the journalist who had written the headline.  When I was at school the plural of roof was rooves.  I've checked and it's not now.

I particularly remember the set of spellings that it was included in.  We had to learn the singular and plural.  Elf/Elves, Hoof/ Hooves, Shelf/Shelves, Dwarf/ Dwarves, Loaf/Loaves.  On an early date with the Long Suffering Husband the plural of roof became a hilarious part of the evening. We were sitting in a pub with one of his friends; a man who I remember as looking like Leo Sayer.  He was trying very hard to be funny and made me snort my Bacardi and coke through my nose with a joke about seven dwarves in a bath (my spell check tells me it's dwarfs now).  Anyway, Leo was telling us about his former girlfiend, who he said was called Ruth.  He told us that Ruth had a best friend, Miss Topps who was also called Ruth.  We laughed about whether they would be two Ruths or two Ruves.

I wondered what my slap happy teacher would have made of this.  Or I didn't wonder, I could hear her loud booming voice bemoaning the dumming down of the English language and incompetents who couldn't be bothered to read.  I wanted to ask her if the rule applied to all words that ended in f? Although, I wouldn't have asked because I was too scared.  I could imagine her calling us all lazy Oafs for getting less than ten out of ten for our spellings.  I'm also sure it was never Chieves, when she went on a rant about how some people had to be Indians.

The Seventies was a decade with terrible patterned wallpaper when we spent our time in school, learning the rules of spelling and how to thread a needle with fear as a motivator.  I'm not sure I want to go back.


Since I starting writing the MPs have voted against the deal.  It's quite a mess.  Maybe the Seventies weren't so bad after all.

No comments:

Post a Comment