Blog Early This Christmas!

Well and truly thwarted in my plans to give you a Christmas Special, and having failed to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, I can at last kick off 2011 with something appropriate. Considering my lack of getting anything done this last December, I can do no better than give you this excellent Barnett Freedman poster from 1938. It will act as a reminder for me to get my finger out next December. Freedman (1901-1958), is one of my favourite designers, amongst the last of a breed once called 'commercial artists' as opposed to 'graphic designers'. He will perhaps be best remembered for King George V 1935 Jubilee stamps and Faber bookjackets, but little recognised for designing an early Penguin chocolate biscuit wrapper. Happy New Year!

Putting You Through Now Caller

Not getting out much this week, so please forgive yet another rummage in my drawers. At least it gives me an opportunity to go on about telephone service vans. Except they're not now, are they? Now they're appallingly signed white vans with mediocre graphics and that utterly meaningless marketing-speak word 'Openreach'. You can see the account team presenting it at BT Towers can't you, doing that irritating thing where they say the word whilst making quotation marks with their fingers. So, is this yet another thing where we're treated as just the next item to put its hand up in a call centre, (anyone who's had to sort out an internet problem with BT will know what I mean), or symptomatic of a much more general malaise? We see this 'Sod the Public' attitude (copyright Kingsley Amis) expressed in so much we have to just look at these days- let alone deal with- in what are supposed to be public services. Train and bus liveries, road signing, local council aberrations. Like so much else in our lives these days, as exhibited by those two unfunny arrogant idiots on Radio 2, it comes down to nobody thinking that courtesy is important anymore. Except the Unmitigated Reader of course. We know that we'd sooner have a deep bronze green telephone van with Her Majesty's crown on the side, wooden ladders and the tyre pressures marked above each wheel. It's not nostalgia, it's good order. And good manners of course.

Landmark Phone Boxes

Maybe in two hundred years time intrepid travellers will start to wonder why remote crossroads are often marked with a red (or by that time a very pale pink) cast iron box with the wind whistling through the fretwork of open spaces. Futuristic fingers, which evolution has elongated by digital 'txtng', will perhaps trace the raised letters round the back that reads 'Carron Ironfounders', and wonder what this strange hieroglyph can possibly mean. The original purpose will, as perhaps for the younger generation now, be impossible to fathom, but the embossed crest will still tell of a long-forgotten monarch. Eventually some long-bearded professor will publish his researches which will tell an astonished world that DNA samples taken over a widespread area led him to conclude that they were in fact public conveniences.