‘My word, you aren’t much of a family for mod con are you?’ said a switched on, fully automatic friend the other day, drifting around my kitchen and smiling tolerantly at our good old fridge, our good old hand whisk and our good old tabby cat asleep on the boiler.
‘Well we do have a fairly new electric toaster,’ I said, looking wildly round. I am just not a very mechanically minded person. In fact I tend to go out shopping for a steam iron and come home with a rose bush.
To impress her I waggled the Vent-Axia cord and ostentatiously fed the waste disposal unit a piece of cabbage. But since these two items were built in to the new house I can’t really claim them as trophies in the kitchen gadget contest. So I suppose I should do something to update my image.
Perhaps a new vacuum cleaner might be the answer. I have to admit that, for years now, I’ve been writhing around the floors with an elderly, torpedo-shaped machine which certainly sounds as if it might be cleaning carpets. But lately, as more and more bits have dropped off (even the home-made string handle) and the smell of burning rubber has grown stronger, I have come to realize that my friend is right.
Not only do I not own much in the way of mod con but most of ours is becoming decidedly old fashioned con. In fact, if I can just make do for a little bit longer, much of my household equipment will become quite valuable as antiques.
My treadle sewing machine is nearly there and how I love it. It does none of those terrifying bursts of sustained electrical seaming, so useful for making parachutes, but so alarming when fiddling about with half a collar. Together we rickety-rack, rickety-rack at rocking-chair speed. No wild swerves around armholes. Just a gentle veer to the right-hand notch, steady as we go.
I like the little accompanying booklet in which a charmingly illustrated matronly lady, with dimpled hands, guides me step by step through the intricacies of bobbin replacement and adjustment of stitch. Together we ease our tensions. The booklet explains it all. There is even a chapter entitled: ‘The Foot Hemmer – Felling’ although I must confess that I’ve never yet felt quite up to reading it through to the end – or felling myself. My kitchen scales, also, are so old and picturesque that they are coming back into fashion and visitors now no longer giggle at the flat-iron and the cobbler’s last that we use as bookends. They, too, are in vogue. However, neither quaintness nor antiquity can in the long run serve as very good reasons for hanging on much longer to a cooker with an ever closing door, however heat-conserving this may be.
So I start slowing down in front of gas and electricity showrooms. Isn’t it strange how one can go on from year to year without giving some things a thought? Take Dalmatian dogs, or Volkswagens or pregnancy. The day comes when one is considering a new puppy/car/baby. Suddenly the world is absolutely full of spotted dogs, Beetle cars or expectant mums. This is now happening to me in the case of electrical equipment. Everywhere I look, there are windows crammed with fantastically improved cookers, not to mention stream-lined mixers, blenders, driers, freezers.
One drops into friends’ homes and there in their bathrooms one suddenly notices that they use electric toothbrushes. Quite casually – without even mentioning the fact in general conversation. I visit three kitchens, one after another and they’ve all got washing-up machines. Another friend is just off to buy her second deep freeze.
Now I don’t care much for those cold, pampered ladies who say smugly that of course they’ve got a chromium plated sauna or a floodlit trout-stream or whatever the last word in mod con happens to be. But these are just ordinary, comfortable, workaday chums who happen to have worn out a whole deep freeze before I’ve even got around to buying my first one.
I discover, too, that my family, the moment they are asked, are yearning to own all sorts of gadgets, given the slightest encouragement.
‘Honestly we could eat much better if only you’d have a deep freeze,’ says my spouse, excitedly. ‘We could buy most of our food in bulk.’ He is obsessed with the idea of bulk. Me, I only need a couple of chops, a pound of carrots and an Oxo cube to cater through the day. But David craves to be surrounded by gallons of HP sauce, sackfuls of frozen peas and entire oven-ready sheep. Daniel says that he could easily make do with a tiny portable television set of his own for Christmas. ‘I could watch Laurel & Hardy all the time if I had my own set,’ he tells me earnestly.
Then one morning a new vacuum cleaner comes into my life. An upright, pale blue one with assorted accoutrements for nuzzling down the backs of armchairs and even for reaching right round behind radiators. For two whole days we beat as we sweep as we clean. Non-stop. Carpets regain their lost youth. My family sit huddled in chairs with their feet off the ground. Unbelievable mounds of fluff are shaken on to the compost heap. Buttons and cobwebs and hairgrips, too.
I flop down at last, to share with Percy Thrower his ‘Gardener’s World’. ‘Aren’t these a picture?’ he is saying, waving his arm over a mass of indistinct grey blobs.
‘Oh do let’s have a colour telly,’ I burst out. ‘Now I come to think of it, I’ve always secretly yearned for a tape recorder, too,’ I add. ‘And a liquidizer.’
Suddenly it is a whole new world of modern convenience. And it looks as if, at long last, I am on my way to join the converted.