The luxury of modern times

The wonders of human innovation were hammered home to me this week when it came to my attention that I was sharing my shower space with a bottle of shampoo that purported to smell like 'whipped silk'. It took me some time to comprehend the enormity of such a claim, but once it hit me, I was quite overcome. Oh, humanity! I thought. Once again you prove yourself to be a species of limitless talent! Somewhere in the world exists a genius who has not only invented a method for whipping silk, but has discovered how to bottle the delicious odour emitted by the said process. Do miracles never cease?

So affected was I by this discovery that on my next trip to Tesco I found myself lingering idly in the cosmetics aisle. Well! I don't mind admitting that I was bowled over by the extent of human ingenuity. The range of options with which to enliven one's bathroom experience is nothing short of astounding. Such an ample supply of heady infusions! Such a vast array of sensuous delights! There are lotions scented with passion flower and potions scented with mulberries. There are tantalising combinations of tiare flower and wild violets, of jojoba milk and liquid amber. Nivea have even produced a deodorant containing 'extract of pearl', which is a fine example of human endeavour if ever I heard of one. I cannot but commend a company that succeeds not only in extracting pearls from the depths of the ocean without a peep of criticism from Greenpeace, but in liquidising the said pearls, pumping them into cans and selling them for a mere £2.50.

I will even go so far as to say that my heart swells with pride when I contemplate the achievements of 21^st century science. For is it not a fine thing to be able to bottle 'morning paradise'? Or indeed, the 'African savannah'? And is it not a stroke of genius to produce a shaving cream made from 'radiant apricot'? I simply cannot think of anything more beautiful than a radiant apricot. Picture it! A ripe and sumptuous example of this fine fruit, ablaze with light as if touched by the hand of God Himself! And to think that I, in my ignorance, had previously assumed that the only kind of radiant apricot was one that had been dusted in nuclear fallout! Admittedly, I am unsure that radiant apricots smell noticeably different to ordinary ones – unless, of course, they give off a faint odour of burning sugar – but such concerns pale into insignificance when one contemplates the magical notion of canning light and using it to shave one's legs. It is equally as captivating as the idea of coating one's armpits in liquid pearls. Oh, but these are exciting times!

Over to you, reader. Go forth! Spend lavishly! Reap the benefits of this age of decadent luxury in which we are privileged to live! And now I fear I've no more energy for fawning, so I hope you'll excuse me as I retire to the bathful of simmered organza that awaits me upstairs.

Experiments with retro technology

At a certain point in the worryingly recent past, my fashion sense ceased its journey through a series of short-lived phases that had previously led me to consider the Sum 41 hoodie, the hot pink cords, the tie-dye maxi-skirt and other, similar horrors to be uncontested wardrobe staples and therefore suitable for wearing in public. After that point, my taste became more refined. I started to appreciate old things. I developed a penchant for rummaging in flea markets and antiques shops; I lusted after silk shirts and pearl earrings, pencil skirts and old-fashioned suitcases. Above all, I lusted after an old bike. I longed to sit atop a leather saddle, belongings tossed into a wicker basket protruding from charmingly curved handlebars, and I began to harbour a fantasy in which I pedalled down the uneven streets of an anonymous but picturesque town on a gleaming Pashley Princess, dressed in a decadent ensemble involving red lipstick, a high waistline and a patent snap-clasp handbag.

A naïve attempt to realise this fantasy ended in me making a whimsical Ebay purchase one day last year. Before I knew it, I was in possession of my very own 1960s 3-speed Triumph bicycle which, though burdened with a number of less-than-desirable retro features including absent-minded brakes and an endemic rust problem, melted my tender little heart. Oh, but she was beautiful – battered, but exquisite. I was enchanted. After a test run or five, I armed myself with some wire wool and a can of WD40 and set about restoring her to her former glory. I was forced to accept the impossibility of this task after several days and approximately thirty-seven old toothbrushes, but my enthusiasm was nonetheless not to be dampened, and I remained hopelessly in love.

Regular use, however, soon began to put our relationship under strain. My daily route took me through the tired council estates and uninspiring alleys of Englefield Green – a far cry from the shady boulevards and cobbled back streets I considered to be this bike's natural home. Out of context, she seemed pretentious and showy, a sad misfit among the BMX monstrosities and skinny racing bikes that always seemed to be overtaking us. Nor was the general ensemble quite so romantic as I had previously envisaged. No kid gloves ever graced my darling's handlebars; no silk scarves ever fluttered in her wake. The leather on the saddle was forlorn and peeling, and the role of wicker basket was filled, I am sad to say, by a practical but somewhat less fetching green rucksack.

Then there was the Sturmey Archer gear box, which offered but three choices: easy, medium and hard. Easy sent the pedals spinning so fast that my legs blurred out of all recognition. Medium made for a pleasant ride until the road sloped upwards by more than three degrees, and hard was like trying to pedal five bikes at once. In the end, I concluded that walking would be easier on both parties, and my poor dear bicycle was consigned – momentarily, I promised myself – to the garden shed.

But my experiments with retro technology were far from over. My next acquisition was a 30-year old film camera – nothing fancy, you understand, but still pretty enough to double most conveniently as a fashion accessory. Whenever I lifted it to my eye I was struck by its simple charm. How quaint it was to peer through a view finder! How delightful to wind on the film! Those poor fools with their 'retro camera' apps, I thought. I've got the real thing! I happened, at this time, to be on a year abroad in Paris, which seemed to me very appropriate (more so, certainly, than Englefield Green). I prowled street, park and quay à la Cartier-Bresson, the camera slung casually around my neck, in search of starry-eyed lovers, old pétanque players, elegant espresso-sippers and jovial waiters, and other, touching moments of cultural significance crying out to be immortalised in 35mm.

A few weeks later, after paying a princely sum to have the film developed, I awaited the finished pieces with baited breath. They would need naming, for sure; titles such as 'Lost in thought', 'Little boy laughing' and 'Hannah, caught unawares' were perhaps to be considered. But when they arrived, the pictures were not quite everything that I had hoped. In some, the subjects were blurred out of all recognition. In others, they were obscured by shadow, or by large patches of pink I took to be stray fingers. Some were even missing bits of their person. It was very disappointing, and brought a short-lived hobby to an abrupt end.

These days, the camera sits filmless and forgotten in a bottom drawer and the bike awaits its pending re-sale on Ebay. The story is not over, for a typewriter may be my next purchase, or perhaps, when I have earned my fortune and learned to drive, a Citroen 2CV. But in the meantime, I am learning to accept that soulless modernity is perhaps no bad thing after all.

Equestrian exploits in Swansea = art on the brink of revolution

It was with interest that I read, in a moment of procrastination, of the Swansea joker who recently ordered a Big Mac and fries at a MacDonalds drive-thru, not from his Renault Clio, nor from his Yamaha, nor even from a humble bicycle, but – and this is entirely true – from the saddle of a horse. I welcomed this news with a mixture of trepidation and delight. Trepidation, because MacDonalds drive-thrus are rarely far from busy roads, and having been inclined to suppose that horses and busy roads went about as well together as, say, aeroplanes and explosive devices, I could not but picture a traumatic sequence of events in which the frantic steed deposits its unfortunate rider into the path of an approaching juggernaut and leaves him to certain death between tyre and tarmac.

But amid such cynicism there was also, as I have said, delight. Mostly because it is a rare and refreshing thing to see a pair of warm-blooded creatures, breathing real air, in a place more often frequented by beings so attached to their cars that nothing – not even bags full of ground offal and saturated fat – will entice them out. Further explanation for my delight is, I feel, superfluous. What a gesture. A horse! At MacDonalds! Sir, I salute you.

Naturally, questions abound. Who is this man? Where can I find his address so that I might send him my knickers? And most importantly, what was the driving force (no pun intended) behind so rash and reckless an act?

I have a theory. Our friend, I like to think, is no mere joker. No! He is an artist. An innovator, if you will, or indeed, a cultural pioneer. Let us imagine that this was his debut performance as leader of the Historicalists, a movement that is uniting eccentrics and oddballs the country over and is soon to burst onto the modern art scene with revolutionary fervour. Its aim: to challenge the sterile, corporate modernity of the myriad establishments that, like MacDonalds, may once have been quirky, innovative and individual but are now bland, generic and everywhere. What! you cry – attacking the nasty capitalists that are stamping on independent businesses and turning our towns into identikit replicas? How, pray, are they to do such a thing without sounding like whiny Guardianistas?

Why, with a dash of retro glamour, my dear reader, mixed with a little self-disrespect and seasoned with a pinch of lunacy. Perhaps the next time our friend goes to a MacDonalds' drive-thru, he will not only be on a horse, but dressed in breeches, tails and a top hat. Perhaps Starbucks will report an influx of Dickensian yuppies with ledgers instead of laptops, who scratch away with quill pens as they sip their cappuccinos. Perhaps the toilets at Pret will crowd with ladies adjusting their powdered wigs; East End eel sellers will loiter at the entrance to Primark; Greggs will ring with the sweet music of medieval minstrels and when the Daily Mail reports a handsome cab pile-up in a Tesco car park, the petit-bourgeoisie will rise and say 'They've gone too far! This must stop! Art has gone mad!'

What better way to highlight the madness of modernity than with a little historic charm? It sounds much jollier than signing petitions and writing letters to oblivious MPs. I don't know about you, but I, for one, have every intention of joining them.

The mystery of the school disco

If you, in spite of your relative youth and long-standing appreciation of bizarre British customs, are nonetheless bewildered by the sight of otherwise rational adults dressing like pubescent schoolchildren of an evening because it increases their chances of getting a shag, you have a friend in me. Why, you ask, does anyone feel the need to recreate a moment of their lives in which they were plagued by crippling paranoia, smatterings of pimples and the fear that they were loved by none but their own mothers? I hear you. And because nothing gives me greater pleasure than assisting my peers in their attempts to untangle the complex and tantalising mysteries that so blight their lives, I have imagined a scenario that may help you to understand the phenomenon known in these parts as the 'school disco'.

Once upon a time, the managing director of Costumez 4 U Ltd entered the conference room looking grave.

'Business is bad, my friends,' he said. 'Customers are bored. The nurse and the policewoman are not enough for them. The French maid is old news. We need something new, something better, something... cutting edge. Let me hear your ideas, my friends.'

And so brows were knit and brains were racked, and lo! there was an idea.

'I have it!' cried a be-suited yuppie. 'Let us celebrate the glory of youth with a smidgeon of adult naughtiness. Let us sex up the secondary school classroom!'

Heads turned in amazement.

'Fool!' spat a colleague. 'Do you want to get us sued?'

'On the contrary, it will be a triumph!' the yuppie continued. 'Sex and nostalgia! A more successful combination there never was! What woman doesn't remember a period when she wished with all her heart that she could expose her buttocks to her slavering male classmates without a pasty spinster giving her detention? What man hasn't, in his time, dreamed about taking the hand of a freckled sex-bomb in a Tipp-exed blazer and holey stockings and whisking her away from the restrictions of corridor decorum? For the sake of all that is good and profit-making, let us reawaken those torturous hormones and put them to good use! And this time they shall be heeded. This time their demands will be met. No more the suppressed urges of yesteryear! No more the regulation skirt lengths that once impeded our pursuit of happiness! This time there will be micro-skirts and non-existent blouses, suspender belts and six-inch heels, and when it is all over everyone will go home and have sex!'

There was a stunned silence, and then the conference room resounded with deafening applause.

And there, readers, is your answer.

On house spiders, newspaper and window boxes

I was sleepy, pyjama-ed and climbing into bed not long ago when a fearsome sight met my eyes. Crouching in all its octopodian majesty on the wall at the foot of my bed was a house spider of epic proportions. There are, in my view, two types of house spider, the first of which I have no objection to: they are sedentary homebodies who bask away their lives in celestial havens of bouncy silk, moving only when unsuspecting bluebottles disturb their reverie and subsequently require mummification. The second type I find more perplexing. The gap-year backpackers of their species, they are errant wanderers prepared to risk their lives trekking across vast plains of wallpaper and challenging deserts of carpet, all the more formidable for their tendency to materialise out of nowhere and ability to cover four times as much ground per second as a creature of their size realistically should. The spider on my wall fell firmly into the second category. It was clearly mid-voyage, trying to decide on the route for the next leg of a journey which, for all I knew, could have led it over my pillow and into my hair. Into my throat, even, if – as is, admittedly, doubtful – the widely propagated claim about spiders crawling into open human mouths as the latter lie in slumber has any basis in fact.

Something had to be done. I generally favour humane methods of dealing with unwanted spiders, repatriation being my usual way of taking care of those that get too close for comfort. But even if I had had a glass jar and some junk mail to hand, this one was so high up the wall that any attempt to capture it came with a serious risk of it falling onto my head, which would have been a traumatic experience for all concerned. And it was late. Bed was calling. Sorry, spider, I thought. Your time has come.

The weekend newspaper was my weapon of choice. In order to avoid getting spider remnants all over something I was likely to want to read later, I carefully extracted the sports section and fashioned it into something vaguely cylindrical that could be wielded with a flick of the wrist. I gave it a test run, smacking it into the palm of my hand like a riding crop. It crumpled in the middle and bent in half. With the crucial part of the weapon flailing about like a limp wrist, the spider would survive the ordeal with nothing more than a set of bruised knees, its natural self-defence and/or revenge mechanisms nevertheless compelling it to scurry towards me at 50 mph and perhaps to launch itself at my face. Anxious to prevent such a freakish turn of events, I reinforced the weapon with the more meaty finance supplement. Happily, subsequent testing showed it to be ready for deployment. I took up my position of attack on the end of my bed, brandishing the improved weapon. Whoosh! it sliced through the air, making a breeze that stirred my hair from roots to unkempt ends, and – whack! met the wall with a slapping noise I felt sure must have woken the neighbours. Alas! I hadn't accounted for my poor sense of spacial awareness, which now came spectacularly into play. It was the fault of my subconscious, perhaps, trying to stay my hand in protest against these hitherto unnaturally sadistic urges, but in fact only managing to make everything worse. The weapon landed off-centre. It was the wall, not the target, that took the full force of the attack. Instead of the neat clout over the head that I had pictured flattening the victim to the wall in a gory but instant death, the unlucky arachnid nose-dived intact towards the carpet with starry vision, concussion and several broken legs. Its fall was broken by the corner of a picture frame, from which it dangled, stunned, hooked into place by one of its four pairs of gnarled limbs, twitching in agony, until – whack! a gentler attack this time, so as not to dislodge the picture frame. Its legs folded beneath it as it plummeted, helpless, to the floor, where it lay consumed in death throes until – whack! a final battering brought its misery to a belated end.

Throughout the proceedings my overwhelming feeling had been one of cruel determination. I had been focussed and single-minded. I had had one purpose, and one purpose only: to kill the damn thing. Yet as soon as the deed was done I was consumed by guilt. I stood over the mangled little body thinking remorsefully of Charlotte's Web, and thought, you did this. You just bludgeoned a spider to death because it was easier to dispose of it than to find it a new home. This is not okay. And resolving to never again rob an honest arachnid of its right to roam wall and carpet as and when it pleases, I picked up the corpse (with my bare hands, to atone for my sins), shrouded it in a tissue, and buried it gently in the window box.