Right royal feast More sausages than you could shake a cocktail stick at
BACK in June, when the celebrations of the late Queen’s Platinum Jubilee were going on, I had a brilliant idea. With all the street parties going on I thought I might visit some posh neighbourhoods to wave my press card to demand free cake and sausage rolls as the Post’s official street party food critic, and if Acacia Avenue didn’t want a bad write-up in the paper they’d better make with the fairy cakes pronto. Oh, and a serviette and cardboard plate, please.
Of course my conscience (ahem) got the better of me. Also fear of getting sacked.
Around the same time I was looking at some photos of local Silver Jubilee street parties from 1977 and noted that the fare served to children 45 years ago seemed to consist principally of sausages on sticks and those cakes kiddies used to make by pouring melted chocolate onto corn flakes.
How very different from the more sophisticated creations modern children can make!
(While still in school, Latimer Junior developed his own signature dish; milk chocolate-covered flapjack with obscene words piped onto the top in white chocolate. His other high-concept creation involved taking a loaf of bread, boring a hole through the middle and sticking a long, and hopefully precooked, sausage through it. Sausage Bread has not yet caught on anywhere.)
As we prepare for the celebrations of the coronation of King Charles III next summer, I wonder if there’s a business opportunity in providing nostalgic retro royal celebration menus for the street parties. I can offer two:
1953 Coronation Celebration
Bloater Paste Sandwiches Cardboard Cake (for display purposes only)
Tinned whale surprise
Trifle (No custard. Custard’s off, dearie)
Cod liver oil squash
One Woodbine per guest
The 1977 Jubilee Junket
Cocktail sausages on cocktail sticks Cubes of cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks
Ham sandwiches on cocktail sticks Crisps on cocktail sticks
One pack of Embassy cigarettes on a cocktail stick
Orange squash made with proper sugar
The serious point (if you want one) is that the first 25 years of Her late Majesty’s reign saw massive improvements in the living standards of all. The start of King Charles’
reign has not been so auspicious. Have you seen the price of cocktail sticks lately?
Woke Victorians
In the last few weeks I’ve been attending a series of meetings in Bedminster. They’re quite a distance from Latimer Towers, but as I really need to spend less time on my backside, I’ve walked some or all of the way to and from them.
It’s been 50 years and more since I last spent any length of time walking the streets of Bedminster, and I’ve been noticing a lot of things. Yes, the obvious stuff like the proliferation of street art, artisan bakeries, vegan cafés and new-build flats alongside the Victorian terraced houses. But also the very large number of nonconformist chapels built in Victorian times. A few are still churches, though mostly of the evangelical kind, but most have long since been repurposed as flats and offices.
I’d not really twigged before how much Victorian and Edwardian
Bedminster must have been a hotbed of nonconformist religion – Methodists, United Reformed, Baptists and more – even the hardline Plymouth Brethren.
It would have been similar in many other urban working class communities at the time. Some would have been home to helland-brimstone preachers, and while others might have been less hard-line, they were all fairly puritanical. They’d obviously have been dead set against sex outside marriage (strictly speaking, some would also have opposed sex within marriage if it wasn’t for the purpose of begetting children). They’d have been against drinking and gambling. Some wouldn’t have approved of dancing or any unchaperoned mingling of unmarried young women and men.
On the plus side, they gave their congregations a framework for improving their lives. Do everything in moderation, keep off the drink, don’t squander your wages on the horses or card games, and
you would slowly improve your lot, and that of your family. They gave the working classes dignity, helped them organise, and they bred much of the leadership of the trades union and labour movements. And being Christians, they also produced conscientious objectors and pacifists (as did the Anglican church).
And I’m walking through Bedminster’s main roads and sidestreets and I’m seeing these churches and trying to channel the long-forgotten sounds of their hymns, and I’m also seeing the modern-day flags and the slogans, murals and notices of meetings and demos …
… And I’m wondering how badly today’s campaigners would take it if I were to tell them that in their evangelism, their rule-setting and their suspicion of fun – but also in their social progressivism – they have a lot more in common than they might think with the Biblethumpers who walked those very same streets long ago.