Cold Comfort Farm

I have been working alone today and apart from the sound of occasional gunfire and neighing horses, it is disconcertingly quiet. The barn I work in usually creaks and groans, but now it is eerily silent, as if hibernating for the winter. I am sitting in a 20' by 10' garden shed, with two convector heaters on full power. I still feel cold.

The books are depressing me today. So many of them have clearly never been read and at times, it feels as if the whole publishing industry is founded on unwanted gifts. In the skip for new books are dozens of copies of the bestsellers of recent Christmases: Frankie Boyle's autobiography, a Top Gear annual, all of Dan Brown's ouevre and countless celebrity memoirs. Very few of them are well-thumbed.

During these silent afternoons of muted light and creeping coldness, I find it hard not to think about my own mortality. Dealing with the detritus of the recently deceased, I'm only too aware that one day it will be my books and photographs that will be turned into lampshades, packaging and road surfacing material.

I have asked people to start saving photos and albums, without telling them why and several things have arrived during the last week. The best was a collection of pictures of a Sussex family taken between 1927 and 1929.

None of the images are particularly remarkable, but what interests me is that they show a society in transition. The older generation - all born during the mid-Victorian age - don't appear to have change their style of dress at all. The photo below could have been taken any time in the late nineteenth century, except that the boy is holding a model plane:

As usual, there are no names, but the locations are all in Sussex. The people in these pictures, particularly the older ones, would probably have spoken with a strong rural burr that was quite different from today's sub-London accent. Click here and you'll hear a real Sussex accent.

The increasingly independent young women of the 1920s must have shocked their grandparents, who had seen their slowly-changing world completely torn apart by the First World War. It's not the past that's a foreign country, it's the future and if you live long enough, you'll be a stranger in a strange land.

More Random Photos Found in Books

I almost avoided using the r-word in the title of the post, as it has been hijacked by teenage girls - "That's like, so random" (with the annoying questioning intonation at the end) - but 'miscellaneous' sounds a little too cosy, as if I should be sitting next to a roaring log fire, sucking a Werther's Original.

Today's selection consists of five photographs, in chronological order, and a postcard.

We begin with a family portrait taken, I presume, during the First World War. The young sailor looks a little more cheerful than his poor brother - and with good reason. The number of casualties in the Royal Navy between 1914 to 1918 was 35,000. In the British Army, almost a million lives were lost.

 

As a father of two sons, I can't begin to imagine what the parents of servicemen went through during World War One. I know that in my own family, the death of a young man in the Battle of Loos affected three generations of people for decades after. Indeed, my grandmother never really recovered and even as late as the 1970s, still clung on to the belief that her brother had survived, but lost his memory.

I wonder whether both of the young men in the photograph survived.

Next, a photo of a man who looks as if he was named Len:

This picture is from the days when men still wore ties in the workshop and had a decent selection of pencils in their top pocket. Len probably subscribed to the 'Valves Yearbook' and certainly knew his oscillators from his cavity resonators.

The invention of the printed circuit has taken all the fun out of electronics, in the same way that the synthesizer ruined the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. A microchip is no substitute for a roomful of glowing valves, overheating diodes and magnetron tubes.

The 1970s, when children could still cycle around suburban streets with only a 23% chance of getting knocked down by a passing motorist. Drivers were still 'motorists' then, as if they possessed a professional skill like a chemist or dentist. If you were a driver, you were probably sitting behind the wheel of a van or lorry.

A grainy 1978 study, next to an unusual window. The back of the photo doesn't give any clues. Is the younger man Sebastian Faulks?

It would be so easy to write something about this photo, but I will refrain, except to say that I'm sure that he was the apple of his mother's eye.

Finally, can anyone guess which part of London this postcard shows?

 

Obviously it's a trick question. It's not London, it's Tehran. I had no idea that they had Routemaster buses, but a quick check on Google confirms that they used to be a 'main feature' of the city's public transport system. 

The other side of the card contains some nice stamps of the Shah and a mention of the 'appetising' food.

 

Fingers crossed for Iran that Mitt Romney doesn't get elected. In fact, fingers crossed for all of us that Mitt Romney doesn't get elected. 

Was that too random?