Cycling down Oxford Street yesterday lunchtime I was depressed, as I always am, by the swarms of people collecting stuff – bags and bags of stuff, that in many cases they can’t possibly need or really want. A beautiful, sunny Saturday and this was the best thing they could think to do with it.
Well not everybody, of course; I’d earlier had a lovely, madly busy session doing handling in the Enlightenment Gallery of the British Museum – barely stopped talking for 2.5 hours.
I particularly enjoy the “gifted kids” – an immediately identifiably category. They are usually with clearly working class parents with limited education, and the parents look with fond bemusement (and a touch of embarrassment) at the child they have produced – one who is interested in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, who talks extremely fluently for their age (usually around 10 or so) on such things.
It is partly because it brings back memories. Mum and I probably looked a bit like that when I dragged her around the Chinese exhibition in Sydney at age 11 or so.
As for the shoppers, well it seems there is nothing new about that. A Liverpool gallery has just opened an exhibition about an early 20th-century shopaholic, an intelligent woman given no professional or even social outlet:
The puzzle about the clothes is that not only were many of them unworn, but they were clothes she had little or no occasion to wear. As the wife of a local GP, she had few opportunities to dress up. The Tinnes do not seem to have had a particularly active social life; her husband held surgeries every evening, and they seldom went to parties.
Perhaps, like many middle-class families before the war, the couple dressed for dinner, but their daughter has no recollection of this. ‘I remember my mother in rather uninteresting black things,’ she says. ‘She wasn’t very stylish, and I just can’t imagine her wearing some of those dresses. Her family would have been shocked.’
This is understandable enough in its time and place; but why is it so many are still behaving in similar ways?
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