The announcement that Unilever is shortly to cease making bars of soap to concentrate entirely on soap-dispensers and shower-gel brings another curtain down on one of those cultural norms which seemed to be a permanent part of civilisation, but of course is not. Modern bar-soap, after all, is largely the invention of the 19th century.
How much else that we once took for granted has now vanished? The structured family breakfast and afternoon tea as a family ritual have just about joined the pterodactyls, and the weekly Sunday lunch - full roast, pudding, coffee, open the belt a notch or two - seems set to join them.
Meals change with foodstuffs. What happened to the sour grapefruit which could only be eaten with sugar? Why is honeydew melon no longer served with powdered ginger? Instant potato Frozen orange juice has gone, and so have tinned fruit salad, and gurcake, and grilled gammon with a slice of tinned pineapple beside. So too have roast chicken and chipolata sausages, and sliced slimming loaves such as Procea, and Smash instant potato, and curry made from apples and sultanas, and potted meat-paste concocted from God knows what, and Stork margarine spread on bread.
Is there a child anywhere who has today to run the gauntlet of semolina or tapioca puddings, or has ever encountered the greasy cholesterol horror that was the common or garden Spam fritter? Does anyone eat tinned tongue any more? And has oxtail soup gone completely out of fashion, never to return? They said Brylcreem had, and it came back; so too did platform shoes and 1970s fashions, pronounced dead for all time, yet bound for a Lazarus-like return.
Little blue bags of salt in crisp-bags are probably gone for all time. So too are tramps and rag-and-bone men with their horses. We shall not see again the cans of drink you opened with a small sharp lever-device (both sides, to allow air to get in). What happened to Babycham? To Double Diamond? To Players Weights and Gold Flake and Sweet Afton and the rather agreeable business of pipe-smoking?
Gone or about to; to join the tank-tops and men's cardigans and trilbies, and full corsets, and bloomers, and woollen long johns and shirt-tails tucked in the underpants. No woman today puts her hair in the curlers or smothers her face with Pond's cold cream before she retires to bed, or goes out to the shop in her curlers or slippers, or wears nylon housecoats or aprons. The drip-dry shirt which was to make irons a thing of yesterday has vanished, as, mercifully, has its most virulent form, Bri-nylon.
Shorts all year
Children no longer wear plimsolls, nor do they whiten them with strange sponge-tipped tubes of whitener. The golliwog is gone for ever. It is many years since boys wore shorts all year round, and had scabby knees from infancy to adolescence. What child today is given a cowboy suit or an Indian warrior's head-dress? When did the last generation of children play cowboys and Indians? And how proof are the ancient childhood games of the street against the threat of the computer? Will it be another story of the native red squirrel being chased out by the imported American grey?
Not necessarily; ten years ago, one could see little girls dancing like American drum majorettes on the street. Now they are more likely to be emulating Riverdance. But gone from our streets are wheeled shopping baskets and string shopping bags and large prams, bearing a baby in bedding, with maybe a string of infantile diversions just beneath the hood. What happened to those striped door-covers to protect the paintwork from the scorching Irish sun? And the cellophane sheeting doing similar duty on shop-windows?
Gone from our homes are woodchip wallpaper which, bizarrely, was hung in order to be painted. Equally unlamented are lino and mangles which actually imprinted unwanted creases on clothes, and twin-tubs and Reckets Blue and pressure cookers which knew to perfection how to cook potatoes so that they were half-mush, half-raw.
But oh for the smell of a stick of old-fashioned shaving soap, administered with a brush and removed with a flat razor blade which left your face looking like the scene of a chainsaw massacre. Is the world better without bottled milk with silver tops, and cream at the top? If it were reintroduced, how soon before sparrows re-learn the trick of pecking open the tops and drinking the cream?
Bottled milk
With bottled milk vanished the milk-float, to join the bread-van in the Great Vehicular Beyond. Returnable bottles with a deposit are gone too, as has that evil device the primus stove, which ruined picnics for generations, and which must have wrecked more marriages than The Other Woman. For at its shrine, a cursing husband would absolutely insist that he was going to make tea for lunch while a windswept wife bitterly watched the sun go down, and their children brawled with deadly and infanticidal deliberation.
Will children ever see an inkwell again? Are the first fountain pen and first leather satchel rites of passage which are gone for all time? And what about baby harnesses or terry-nappies held together with an assegai-sized safety pin on which you could as easily spit the child and barbecue it? What about the fake electric fire, Tupperware, TCP and paraffin oil stoves, and holidays in Bray and Greystones and woollen swimsuits and lavatory tissues made of oiled sandpaper? And how soon before first communion suits go the same way?
For, if bar-soap can go, what left is sacred?
