Naylors of Bakewell Glass Dish

Can a piece of glassware be regarded as ephemera? The advertising on this little glass tray seems to make it so. The gorgeous hand rendered text - which on its own is a joy to look at after the eye has been  numbed by the vulgarity of digital type - and the red on white demand attention by default. Even the cheeky everso slightly creepy humanoid-porcine face looks directly at you from within the litho. It's not often that you get the animal's face on the advert for the meat it belongs to these days.  Supermarket packaging seems to assume we don't want to associate the animal with the food as if it will somehow make it distasteful.

Naylors of Bakewell Glass dish 12 x 9 cm C. 1950-60's maybe later.

By its nature an unbroken glass object is potentially ephemeral. It's always poised to become changed and fractured yet still recognisable in parts as its original self. Bakewell, the small Peak District town from where this dish originates is much the same. I spent many childhood summers in and around Bakewell, blissfully unaware that as time and progress advanced the place would change so much from the way I knew it.

The Bakewell of the 21st Century is a pastiche of the place I knew as a little girl. Doubtless the Bakewell of my Childhood in the 1980's was a different one to that of my Father's or Grandfather's and indeed my Great-Great Grandfather who farmed in the area, but I can't help feel that things have changed just a little too far beyond reasonable progress. The life blood of the place has been let, and what remains is a pale mirage amongst the ruins of the original. Although there is still a cattle market every Monday and a traditional Lammas cattle fair in the guise of Bakewell Show, the redevelopment of the market square and the placing of a supermarket in the heart of the farmer's exchange somehow seems to sum up the slow exsanguination of this ancient working rural town.

I've never worked out if this dish was intended to be an ashtray, or simply just an object with an advert on it. Naylors the butchers is long gone from Bakewell, but it's good to know that local butchers in the area still go to market every week and pick the finest beasts for their handmade pies and sausages.

They don't make them like this anymore #1

Beautiful design and print - check
Heavy fibrous old paper with a delightful sweet scent  of lost city adventure - check
Added unique narrative glimpse of someone's day out to London town - check
Nostalgic by pure default - check

Woman's Weekly Muppets / Rupert Knitting Pattern

As a big Rupert fan I'm thrilled to have in my collection this pull out knitting pattern from a 1980's edition of Woman's Weekly. A Great-Aunt of mine used to get WW and she used to knit me some of the toys or jumpers that often featured as part of the magazine. Indeed the knitting patterns were no doubt part of the selling point of the magazine ( along with no small thanks to Roger Royle and the Robin Family ) It's something to note that you might be hard pressed to find a knitting pattern of any description in a contemporary general interest magazine aimed at the modern woman - even in perhaps the publications such as Prima that push the craft lifestyle choice to the reader. People just don't knit anymore - any why should they even bother to learn when it's cheaper to buy a mass produced garment shipped in from China.

Anyway, I do remember this knitting pattern at the time of publication. As to the date I think I must have been just a little over the age for wanting to sport a Rupert or Kermit jumper despite a continued but perhaps more closeted love for Rupert as teenage years loomed. So I think perhaps Circa 1987 for this pull out. There is some comfort that the Muppets and Rupert still endure and delight as the years pass but almost as certain as the absence of knitting patterns in current woman's magazines I can bet that if someone were to knit these jumpers up today they would cost a pretty penny in such fashion emporiums aimed at the youth and would be sported with much confused post modern irony down Brighton's Laines and beyond. Or maybe I'm projecting a little here . . . .