Decrepitude

The 1950s were not a comfortable time. Loopaper was brown and shiny like the stuff you wrap parcels with - only worse, central heating and duvets hadn’t yet reached the UK, domestic appliances - if you had them -  tended to go wrong at crucial moments, and cars didn’t start if the weather was at all cold or damp – which was most of the time. Both Frog and I were brought up in old houses with high ceilings, big rooms and draughty windows and doors, which only made things worse.

    Consequently, as soon as we were in a position to buy a house of our own, we went for something modern. And then, whenever we had any spare money, we ditched the old furniture we had acquired from friends, family and skips, and replaced it with shiny new stuff from Habitat and later Ikea. Antique shops with their smell of mould gave us the horrors: they were all too reminiscent of the pain of our youth.
     A couple of years ago however we discovered a programme on Quest TV called ‘Salvage Hunters’. It is fronted by a real person, not a presenter – the delightful Drew Pritchard. Drew ‘scours the country’ (as the intro says) – junkyards, the back rooms of statelies and museums, defunct circuses and theatres, factories, farms, schools - for antique items to sell from his warehouse in North Wales and on the internet. But not just any antiques. On Wednesday’s programme for instance he bought sacks of hundred-year-old twine. He buys ancient metal cupboards with the paint peeling off, tumbledown sheds, manky wooden tables covered in stains, rusty garden furniture. And then he leaves them just as they are. (He calls it ‘patina’.) And people snap them up.

    I know, I know. We’re a bit out of date aren’t we. Decrepitude isn't really that weird any more. But it is to Frog and me. But slowly, under the influence of Drew, we too are beginning to see its value: it’s fun, it’s quirky, and it’s more natural than brand spanking new.
    What's more, I've recently inherited a couple of pieces of antique furniture from my mother and immediately they arrived the house looked more mellow, more comfortable even.
    Which is why, when we started recently to research making over our forty-year-old bathroom, the last thing we wanted was modern, white and square. We wanted a cave, we decided, inspired by the new bathroom of my brother J. Then when we found some pebbled flooring we decided ‘underwater’ was our theme. Then we found a mirror made from a porthole. And it all came together.

    We are going to have a shipwreck cave - a cave furnished with items apparently from a shipwreck. And our first job is to head to the beach and find some driftwood – and perhaps some other Drew-like items that can be put to good use.

A tumbledown shed which I've passed almost every day for the last thirty years on my dogwalks but didn't really see until yesterday.

As I head for my mid-sixties, I can only hope that the current fashion for decrepitude applies to humans as well.