DID you see the commercial that was on the telly a few weeks ago – the one that shows a woman dabbing nail varnish on her stockings to stop a ladder? Silly, I know, but it set me thinking about things that were once everyday occurrences but have now disappeared.
Of course, I may be on dodgy ground here. After all, I can’t claim to be an expert on ladies’ hosiery. There again, I was married for 10 years and never remember my wife resorting to such repair work. Perhaps using nail polish on ladders has gone the same way as darning socks. It’s no longer done in our throw-away society. Why bother about ladders when you can simply buy another pair of stockings … well, tights?
I think I’ve spoken before about the demise of the front-room poker, but can I ask this? Do women still need zipping up? As a child I was always being asked to do up zips at the back of my mam’s dresses but the ex-Mrs P never made a similar request.
My late and much missed Uncle Ron once told me that during the days of rationing his sister daubed her legs with gravy browning whenever she was unable to buy nylons and he, as a young boy, would have to go up her skirt (oo-er Mrs!) and draw “seams” down the back of her legs with an eyebrow pencil. You’d be locked up for that now.
Another item that appears to have disappeared, if you’ll forget the phraseology, is the hat pin. My mam used to have a big hat around the time I was five (1962) and I used to think she was actually pushing those huge pins into her head rather than through her hair.
And where would you buy a woman’s hat nowadays? I can remember three or four milliners on Stamford Street, Ashton, in the 1960s. But that’s nearly half a century ago.
Ordinary hair rollers have been superseded by the heated kind. Anyone remember Saturday mornings in the Sixties when every other woman seemed to have her hair wound around lots of brightly coloured plastic rollers, usually topped off with a chiffon scarf? They looked like television satellites on legs.
Does anyone still take a bowl into the chippy, or even to the ice cream van? I’m afraid even I don’t remember jugs in pubs. Well apart from the odd barmaid. And there’s another thing. Did the archetypal buxom barmaid ever really exist?
My mam would be appalled at the amount of time I’ve spent on licensed premises but I really can’t remember any, shall we say, legendary figures. Pity.