Bored of the napkin rings – a tale of changing civilisation
Imagine the scene: a telly archaeologist of the distant future is excavating the site of some late 20th-century suburban villas. Among the relics of long-vanished domestic life is a mysterious collection of small, hollow metal cylinders. Were they decorative? Did they have some religious significance? Eventually a reference in an ancient text solves the enigma. The curious objects are napkin rings – used by our forebears for storing the cloths with which they wiped their mouths and fingers after eating.
The napkin ring, once the default Christening gift of unimaginative godparents, has been in decline for decades. The rot probably started in the Twenties, when Lady Redesdale, mother of the Mitford Sisters, worked out the horrifying cost of laundering clean napkins and banished them from the dining table. “Paper ones would, of course, have been unthinkable, and individual napkin rings too disgusting for words,” Jessica Mitford recalled.
Disgusting or not, John Lewis still stocks an extensive range of napkin rings, from the “beautifully crafted” Georg Jensen Bernadotte to the budget Swirl. But the online purchasers’ age range – 35 to 60-plus – reveals a bleak future for the humble household accessory. The young have no use for them, and they are losing their place in that redoubtable institution, the Johnny Lew’s wedding list, replaced by fire pits, gin glasses, smart speakers and bowls (more popular than plates, apparently). What, then, do design-conscious young marrieds wipe their fingers on as they sit around their fire pit, sipping their gin and eating their dinner from bowls? Each other, I suppose.
Laundry, as writers from Beatrix Potter to Hanif Kureishi have recognised, is the stuff of high drama. The universal human need for clean sheets and properly goffered pinafores draws people together in strange and magical combinations. Hong Kong is discovering this as a new wave of self-service launderettes opens for residents whose flats are too tiny to accommodate a washing machine.
Unlike the hospitable but distinctly utilitarian establishments exemplified by the famous Eastenders’ Bridge Street launderette, formerly presided over by Dot Cotton, the latest Hong Kong launderettes are more hipster hang-out than bagwash. The New York Times reports that the shift of laundry from the private to the public realm is changing the social fabric of the city, with customers of Coffee & Laundry, a stylish launderette/cafe/art gallery hybrid, lingering over a cappuccino and discovering the joys of neighbourhood gossip among the dryers.
A while ago, a pair of beautiful and extrovert Egyptian geese came to live on the foreshore below our flat. In the mornings they woke us with their raucous honking, and in the evenings they conducted a showy passeggiata along the waterfront. We became tremendously fond of them and were wretched when, towards the end of the winter, a lone goose was to be seen mooching disconsolately along the tideline.
Some weeks later, there were two geese again, now escorting a quartet of goslings. We couldn’t have been more delighted if we’d hatched them ourselves. This morning, there were the parents – but only three goslings. Apparently Egyptian geese were officially declared a pest in 2009, but I’ve never encountered a more engaging pest.