What I’ve missed
In lockdown, Peter York missed drinks and master craftsmen
Lockdown desires
The last time I took some cash from an ATM,I had a moment of near panic when the machine asked for my password.
This lovely familiar figure – key to a good night out, a round of drinks and the taxi home – and part of the bi-weekly ritual suddenly seemed elusive. I hadn’t used it for months.
With nothing to spend cash on, my twice-weekly visits had stretched to one every five months.
My horizons had shrunk to the weekly food delivery – scanning the street from my balcony every five minutes for the familiar van – and the Amazon haul.
But, after a year of this, you want something more. According to a recent report, Brits will have £250 billion saved by this June.
In a weird, two-speed economy, with loads of unemployed – and more to come – in the retail, restaurant, travel and leisure sectors; there’s another group, better off precisely because they haven’t been shopping, eating out, drinking out and travelling.
You can see the divide, and its age. There’s a mass of high-spending baby-boomers who went out and away all the time. Mortgages paid up, pensions-funded up, they were seduced by ads, showing insanely fit versions of themselves in the Maldives or the rainforests.
Baby boomers have been huge luxury-spenders over the last thirty years because they’re ‘worth it’.
They’ve taken that crucial bourgeois-individualism-made-easy phrase to heart. But, at the same time, they remember 50s and 60s childhoods, where, by today’s standards, no-one had anything.
However North Oxford uppermiddle, however Swallows and Amazons a childhood, there was nothing to buy and nowhere to go.
People with nice, big houses didn’t all have nice, big central heating. It was a world of thick blankets and hot water bottles.
But, above all, baby-boomers are the last generation to be raised with parents and grandparents who remembered the War. People who’d actually say, in a totally non-ironic way, ‘It’ll see me out,’ of a coat or carpet. People who believed that too much dry-cleaning would weaken a well-built suit.
This extravagance was created by a generation symbolised by Viv Nicholson (the ‘spend, spend, spend’ 1961 pools winner brought up in poverty). A generation who remembered their parents quoting Macmillan’s ‘You’ve never had it so good’ of 1957 or Frank Norman’s ‘Fings ain’t what they used to be.’
Baby-boomer extravagance came from a low base. It was always weighed down with all that folkloric vocabulary, pushed to a corner called funny stories about oldies that recurred in their golden years in mad LA or Monte Carlo.
So, as a baby-boomer myself, what do I really want now, if and when normality returns?
I want the serendipity of a layered evening in Soho, where you get a taxi because you’re running late.
You start with a drinks-time thing, then you peel off to bars (stay in Soho or slum it in Mayfair), see more people and get five or six off to supper somewhere.
Usually a taxi home, even though I’m a deep Tube-lover. Did I really spend all that money on an evening?
What I want even more is people doing jobs I can’t do. There’s a clever architect two streets away, who’s designed brilliant, bespoke storage in his own house.
I want him to do something like that for me: to counteract the idiotic deployment of space in a 90s conversion of my 1850s London house.
There’s the electrician I’ve given a clump of table lamps to rewire, replug and re-switch so they can be put to work again.
My handyman has been doing things for years at my old house and the place I rented while they did up the first – largely wrong– fix here. There’s a mass of things for him to do when he’s allowed back in.
A few years ago, I met a serious picture restorer at a party, who’d worked on lovely things from galleries or famous dealers. It turned out she lived up the road.
It was my first lockdown luxury: arranging a timed-to-the-second, no human contact transfer. I’ve got them back and up now and it’s been money very well spent.
Now I’m having a furniture restorer take the few things that deserve it – it’s a combination of value and sentiment – from their miles-away storage, glue back the bits that have fallen off, polish off the dog and cat damage on my animal-mad aunts’ things, and finish off with a subtle waxing – no high-gloss dealer’s shine. Can’t wait.
All the smart restaurants I went to have been emailing recently about their posh meals-on-wheels. I’ve started buying them as a weekend break from my relentless weekday diet: supermarket fish-and-two-veg.
I’m dressing better than I need to but also working my way through my clothes and working out what I can give away. And the same with small rugs and small furniture.
I give them to friends; it’s a kind of reverse extravagance. But they pay a hefty price. They have to send me fulsome, inscribed photographs of the jacket or the rug in situ.
They always look great!