21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (27 page)
Read 21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) Online
Authors: Steve Stack
As this is my book I feel I can allow myself a couple of selfish entries. I doubt if many of you can remember the Maverick, but it was my favourite chocolate bar, and if I want to include it, I bloody well can.
The Maverick was Nestlé’s answer to the Fuse bar from Cadbury’s. It had similar ingredients – raisins, biscuit, and toffee pieces – but was more rough and irregular, where the Fuse was a pretty standard cuboid. The Maverick trumped the Fuse in that it also had a layer of caramel.
It was very nice, so it was. I used to have one every lunchtime.
At least I did from 1997 to 2000, when they were suddenly, and without warning, discontinued. It seems that the combination of patchwork-coloured wrapper and remarkably bland TV ads failed to ignite the desires of our chocoholic nation. I was gutted.
Still am, to be honest.
But this story has a sort of happy ending. Seven years after the demise of the Maverick I was writing my first book,
It Is Just You, Everything’s Not Shit
, and was interviewing the nice people at www.aquarterof.com about sweets and snacks, when I happened to mention my sadness at the lack of Mavericks. A few months afterwards I received an email from Sol at A Quarter Of; one of their suppliers had found a decade-old box of Mavericks and she wondered if I wanted a couple. Her husband had tried one the night before and was still alive so she thought it was safe enough.
I jumped at the chance and was stupidly excited when the jiffy bag turned up containing three bars. I got stuck straight in to one of them, sharing pieces with my kids. It was everything I remembered: crunchy, chewy, chocolatey, caramelly, and lovely.
If a little bit stale.
I lived to tell the tale and ate the remaining two bars shortly afterwards. I got a bit emotional when I finished off the last one, knowing that it was the last time I would ever taste my favourite chocolate bar.
Nothing has since managed to take its place. Not even the KitKat Chunky. I shall learn to live with my loss.
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Where I have plonked everything else …
The revolving restaurant at the top of the Post Office Tower (now known, of course, as the BT Tower) closed in 1980, partly out of security fears. The IRA had tried to blow it up in the early ’70s and it was seen as too high (in both senses) a risk location.
The Top of the Tower restaurant, to give it its proper name, first opened in 1966 and was run by the people behind Butlins Holiday Camps. The main dining area revolved a full 360 degrees, offering an unprecedented view of London. It took 22 minutes to complete a full circuit, which makes it faster than the London Eye.
The menu was proper posh for the time, all in French, and included such delights as
La Darne de Saumon d’Ecosse
,
Le Rumpsteak
, and
Le Gammon Grillé
. Minimum charge was £2.50 and ‘patrons having ordered their food and wine may sit and watch the ever-changing view until they choose to leave’.
The original establishment has been closed for over 30 years, but there had recently been talk of the restaurant re-opening in time for the London Olympics in 2012, with more than one famous celebrity chef rumoured to be taking charge, but BT have now cancelled any such plans.
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During the 1930s, over 65 million telegrams were being delivered every year, in the UK alone.
Hand
delivered, that is.
Before the days of email, faxes, and mobile phones, a telegram was often the quickest and most confidential way to send urgent information. The sender would write out the message using as few words as possible (they were charged per word), and hand it over to the telegraph officer (usually at the post office), who would send the message via a radio signal (often Morse code) to the office nearest its recipient. There it would be decoded, written out, and given to a delivery boy to hand over personally.
The role of delivery boy was taken very seriously, and there were strict rules about uniform and behaviour. There was even an early morning exercise regime. It was a very responsible job and the older boys even got to ride motorcycles to speed up delivery.
One of the most famous telegrams was sent in 1910, when the captain of a ship sailing to Canada spotted Dr Crippen among his passengers. He got a message to Scotland Yard, who sent a detective on a faster ship to arrest the murderer upon his arrival.
My own favourite telegram was sent by American humorist Robert Benchley when he first visited Venice. It read: ‘Streets full of water. Please advise.’
By the 1960s, the volume of telegram traffic had dropped to about 10 million a year, but the service limped on, making a loss, until 1981, when it was taken over by the newly privatised British Telecom and finally put out of its misery. Stop.
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Another victim of our digital age. Although you can still come across it from time to time in some form, when a waiter takes your order at a restaurant, for example, the need for carbon copy paper has more or less vanished from our lives.
Every office, and many homes, would have had a stash of the stuff. In case any of you are too young to remember, it was a thin sheet of paper with a coating of ink on one side. It was used, usually when typing, between two blank sheets to create an instant copy of your document. It could also be used for handwritten copies, which was helpful to the waiter taking orders.
It was pretty weird stuff. You had to be careful when handling it to make sure your document didn’t end up with ‘blue thumb’, and its properties, quite literally, wore off with use, but it did the job nicely.
Until, that is, computers came along. Nowadays it is just a matter of clicking SAVE to ensure that a copy of your letter, invoice, or manuscript of yet-to-be-published book [pauses to save document entitled
21st Century Dodos
] is stored forever. Unless your computer crashes, or your hard drive fails, or you encounter the blue screen of death, of course. Carbon copies did have the advantage of being physical things and immune to computer bugs.
Actually, computers are where carbon copy paper lives on, albeit in a virtual sense. Every time you cc someone in on an email, you are, whether you know it or not, creating an electronic carbon copy.
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I live near Heathrow airport and twice a day, every day, my house would shake as if there were a small earthquake underfoot, and a noise similar to the one Donkey Kong makes when bashing down the girders (only a lot louder) would drown out all other sound.
If any other plane were responsible for such disturbance, then I’d have written to my MP, complained to the highest authority, and refused to pay my taxes until they fitted a muffler but, somehow, the fact that it was Concorde made it OK – exciting, even. Catching a glimpse of that ivory bird as it flew overhead was a highlight of the day.
It was a peculiar beast in almost every respect. The only commercial plane to fly faster than the speed of sound, it was conceived in the late 1950s when several countries were investigating supersonic transport, including Britain and France. With considerable backing from their respective governments, BAC and Aerospatiale joined forces to work on Concorde, so named to reflect the friendly arrangement that had brought it about.
By the time test flights were taking place in the late 1960s, most of the other countries had dropped out of development, and many had placed orders for Concorde themselves. But even though over 100 orders were taken, a great many were cancelled because of concerns over cost and, in the end, only 20 were manufactured, of which 14 made it into commercial service.
Concorde had looks and it had speed. Its peculiar wing and nose design made it unlike any other aeroplane in the skies, instantly recognisable. It could fly at more than twice the speed of sound (Mach 2.04, 2,173 kph or 1,350 mph) and that meant that it cut hours off long-distance flights. It still holds the record for the fastest transatlantic airliner flight of 2 hours, 52 minutes, and 59 seconds, at an average speed of 1,920.07 kph (1,193.08 mph), which it achieved on 7 February 1996 between JFK and Heathrow airports.
It cost a pretty penny to fly on, though; at least it did once British Airways paid off the government and assumed full ownership in 1983. As a result, passengers tended to be top businessmen (who were charging it on expenses), Hollywood actors, or rock stars.
That wasn’t the only drawback. It was, as I mentioned at the beginning, bloody noisy, and several countries refused to allow it to pass through their airspace. By the time of its retirement it was only running a select number of routes.