Stopping By Pubs On A Summer Evening

When the dog days of July are over and the sun, without warning it seems, starts to wane towards the equinox, I think back to the days of my childhood and the late August summer holidays. I think of runner beans and woodsmoke, the absence of song from the exhausted blackbirds and the sudden twilight where there was once a long summer evening. As night descends, a melancholy scent fills the air from the tree leaves as they start to dry out before the decay. Not quite yet the crisper nights of early autumn; there is enough of the evening left for a pub visit on a late summer evening.  Somewhere in August 2011 a robin changes his song to his haunting winter notes and I'm taken back to 1980, with my family and we've stopped at a pub on the way home from a trip to Scarborough. Glasses of hock or shandy for the grown ups, lemon and lime for me and a bag of salt and vinegar walkers crisps, the green of the packet an echo to the verdant glory of the summer and a longing for the holidays to never end. Always at these country pubs the drinks would appear along with the necessary beer mat. Thick and dry or wet and pulpy, bright and bold and always scented - either fresh from the stack, wet and sodden with beer, or vaguely perfumed with the dried splashes of alcohol, they have always fascinated me.

I bought a carrier bag full of beer mats from a shop in Hastings one summer about 10 years ago. It was August and I was lamenting the long lost summers of the early 1980's. Many of the coasters are probably from the 1970's but nonetheless trigger those memories of childhood summers of the early 1980's. In the cultural landscape of the 1970's, percieved sexual prowess sold alcohol to men, or at least made the drinker feel more desirable to the female sex. For the brewery, connecting your product with the drinker's penis has to be a surefire winner.  For the woman ( or doe-eyed '70's "girl" ) it was about impressing a male archetype at a job interview. However, the emphasis was not on career - Babycham assumed that the girl wouldn't be power dressing in the prospective job. Non the less Babycham would gird her with the important wiles and common sense she was obviously lacking for a job interview. I'm not entirely convinced that many things have changed in the 30 years since these beer mats came into being - not least the methods of selling alcohol, but some things do change for the better. Stamped upon this printed liquor-ringed cardboard is a poweful glimpse of a past cultural landscape. In these textured gaudy pieces of cardboard we behold the power of the ephemeral item to convey and bear witness to a past time - and the ironies that only the passing of time and age can amass.

Aside from the almost charming and seemingly innocent playful sexism on these mats, I adore the tactile beauty of the offset registration and the patterns where the ink has half taken to the texture. Printing techniques like this ensured that no two mats were alike, much like a snowflake, and all the more beautiful  for their archived existence.

There are dozens of beermats in my collection and I'll show more in later posts ( there's a promise to keep ) but for now, here are 2 selected at random that take me back to the early '80's and  stopping by pubs on a summer evening . . . 

Attention Men! Drinking our sex in a bottle will get you the girl like this one! she's waiting to fellate you into the next working week!

But if you don't get the girl, don't worry, have a wank, we'll even show you how! - it's what your right arm's for after all

Rupert and Collecting

In the early 1980's my Grandmother used to cut out the Rupert panels from the Daily Express and save them for me. She also saved for me PG Tips tea cards, stamps and other various items of interest. I had many of these Rupert cuttings but throughout the years of desk culls and sorting through drawers only a treasured few remain in my collection.

Daily Express Newspaper Clipping Circa 1983

As with all good newspaper ephemera, they exhibit tiny gems of information from the time of print. Rupert, of course, transcends any age, he will always live innocently in the fabled world that many Express or Daily Mail readers wail over as a lost paradise, all the more enchanting to right wing idealists because it never really existed. On the reverse are listings for ITV's "Duty Free", the sitcom based on the Spanish package holiday boom that reached glory days in the '80's. We also get a snippet of the dining experiences on offer to the average tabloid reader - Beefeater Restaurants. Breaded mushrooms remained a staple of '30's built mock Tudor dining establishments well into the mid 1990s ( I served hundreds of thousands during a 3 year stint as a Sous Chef at a Tetley restaurant pub) More associated 1980's content in later posts.

Daily Express Newspaper Clipping Circa 1983 - reverse

Back to our little bear friend. As a vehicle for narrative, illustration and storytelling, Rupert is about as pure and as delightful as it gets. I was a big Rupert fan and still am when it comes to the original drawings. I'm not enamoured by current responses to the Rupert brand and if anything sums up the perils of being tied to the renderings of the digital age than this.

On the presumption that this site is an on-line content response to a client's brief, I still find the style garish and unsophisticated and as a result patronising to the developing child. I don't lay the blame on the designer completely. I've worked with many clients who think they know what children want, but are instead obsessed with what they think children want and as a consequence create a sterile response to what should be magical and inviting. The pure beauty found in the original line drawings has been squashed and overwhelmed by the solid pre-school block colours and crude shapes. I'm protective over the original Rupert charm, but nostalgia for my own childhood put aside, I really don't like this "modern" update.

I'm quite sure that all of the client's boxes were ticked - all but the "retain original charm and magic" requisite. Rupert doesn't need re branding for younger children of for any stage of a child's development. The original format panels show how the rhyming couplet caption translates the story perfectly for the younger child. They are captivated by the illustrations and the verse before they progress to the lengthier text, and when they are able to enjoy the text their experience continues to be enriched by the illustrations.

It's not all bad for Rupert. Some older animations of the franchise held close to the beauty and charm of the original line drawings. Geoff Dunbar's Frog Chorus  holds the essence of the original Rupert drawings enhanced via the animation process with empathy and skill. Nostalgic or not, that can't be denied.

When I handle the Rupert clipping I occasionally wonder if I would have had the same love of ephemera if I had been born later. Children growing up now find themselves forced into an age of instant gratification of information and virtual visual reward . If I was a child now, would my grandmother have sent me - in place of saving a clipping from the paper -  a link to the Rupert Eco Explorer's site, which I would have bookmarked and, 25 years later would I think to retrieve the link and imagined my grandmother clicking on the send button? I'd rather have my cut out yellowed newspaper clippings with the edges made by my grandmother's scissors, rendered jagged by the slight tremor that she had in her later years.