When all else is falling apart, it’s time to get out the duster…
Amid the Sturm und Drang (or frantic hoo-ha, as it is known to Brexiteers) of current politics, one gloriously reassuring image has emerged. It is a photograph of a cleaner, neatly clad in pinny and rubber gloves, whisking the grime from the fanlight above the front door of No 10 Downing Street with (a nicely inclusive touch, this) a rainbow-coloured lambswool duster.
Throughout the assorted dramas of my adult life, I have learnt that there is no crisis so terrible that it cannot be improved by a brisk touch of housework
– if only because one then has a nice clean house in which to be miserable. You could argue that this is mere displacement therapy – the domestic equivalent of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. But the resonances are richer than that.
Order is good for morale: the famous 1940 photograph of the milkman with his crate of bottles, surrounded by the devastation of the London Blitz, might have been staged, but it spoke to a deeper truth about the steadfastness of ordinary things.
The same principle, of taking control of small tasks as a route towards tackling more formidable problems, underpins the “broken windows” theory, which argues that a society where order is maintained in small matters, such as fixing broken windows, is one where communal bonds of civility and joint responsibility are strengthened.
Whatever the current state of civility and joint responsibility within the Cabinet room at No 10, it is good to know that the Prime Minister is sustained by an immaculately gleaming fanlight.
In the frozen wastes of Antarctica, a clutch of Emperor penguin chicks who should have been pushing up the permafrost have survived, thanks to a BBC camera crew.
Last night’s episode of Sir David Attenborough’s Dynasties found a group of mothers and chicks trapped in a ravine from which escape was all but impossible. As the birds perished, the crew decided to act: in a rare exception to the wildlife documentary convention of allowing nature to take its course, they dug a ramp to enable the remaining birds to rejoin their colony.
While the heart applauds, the head demurs. But the penguins had shown themselves capable of cooperation in dire conditions – so why should a cameraman with a handy spade not engage in a bit of trans-species cooperation, as long as he admits it? The danger is that viewers begin to demand a happy ending. As Sir David observes: “tragedy is part of life”. The instinct to make everything all right is a noble one
– as long as it doesn’t obscure the reality that such documentaries claim to reveal.
A correspondent to The Sunday Telegraph writes of discovering the recipe for Prince Charles’s christening cake in an old Daily Telegraph cookbook that includes such alarming dishes as Scrambled Hake. But as prawn cocktail and Arctic roll enjoy a moment of retro chic, what better time to discover the lost delicacies of British cuisine?
Mrs Beeton’s stewed veal gristles are surely overdue a renaissance, while Florence White’s Good Things in England suggests an exotic novelty for vegans: swede shoots. “Peach colour, [with] rather a strong smell”, the gourmets of Thirties’ Milton-underwychwood couldn’t get enough of them.