The H Factor

We Made It – Busta Rhymes feat. Linkin Park

In 1983, my father purchased our first VHS video recorder.  Actually, that’s a lie.  He got it on HP from Radio Rentals, which is how one obtained appliances in those days because they were too expensive to buy outright.  It was the size of a small suitcase, with enormous buttons which had to be depressed by about an inch, and tapes that were loaded into the top with the force of someone arming a nuclear missile.

We were not the first in our street to have a VCR, (Betamax was quite big down our way), but we WERE the first to have one with a remote control.  Never mind that it actually a handset on a very long cable, snaking round the furniture all the way to my dad’s brown velour Parker Knoll recliner – the fact remains that you didn’t have to get up to fast forward through mum’s recording of Upstairs, Downstairs to get to The Cannon & Ball Show.  Our neighbours came round to look at it, and for a while it was like our family had made it.

Other people’s stuff became a bit of an obsession for me throughout the 1980s, because in my world everything was the same.  My dad was in the RAF, so every house we lived in was pretty much identical to the one before, with exactly the same furniture, carpets, curtains and decor as all my friends.  The preferred method of one-upmanship was buying the latest electrical items – my dad also had a state-of-the-art Technics HiFi the size of a fridge, with a smoked glass door and faux-mahogany speakers that doubled up as lamp tables.  Despite its abundance of tuners and equalizers and several miles of cable, he used it to play little else other than Dr Hook, The Carpenters and Kenny Rogers, which in retrospect was unforgivable.

During the brief and deeply scarring boarding school phase, my friend Samantha invited me to spend a weekend at her house.  This was hugely exciting for me, and I spent many evenings leading up to this event interrogating her on the details of her family estate.  She told me about the orchard, and the pond full of fish, and the garage where her dad kept his cars (plural cars!), and the bathroom that only she used.  I couldn’t Imagine a 10-year-old girl having a bathroom JUST FOR HERSELF.  Not one you had to wait outside, dying for a wee, while your teenage brother spent 20 minutes having a poo and reading his Eagle comic, nor one where your dad would exit, come down to the kitchen and announce “you might want to give it ten minutes”.  HER OWN BATHROOM.  I had never in my life heard of such a thing, except possibly the Queen might not have to share.. 

On top of all this, her house had a NAME.  I remember it still – it was called Willowbanks.  Only huge stately homes had names, as far as I was concerned – Chatsworth, Longleat….and now Willowbanks.  It must have literally BANKS of willow trees, probably overhanging a river full of leaping trout and a gamekeeper called Mellors.

By the time we arrived at Willowbanks, I was expecting nothing short of Pemberley.  It was, of course, actually just a very ordinary detached house of 1970s vintage, with a sizable garden and a double garage.  She did have her own bathroom, but only because the house had two and her bedroom was on a different floor from the others.  The orchard was five neglected apple trees next to a putrid-looking pond.  It was, frankly, a bit rubbish.  And it was in bloody Devizes.

So I was reminded of this the other day while I was staying with friends at their family home in Norfolk, which is a large Grade-2 listed thatched cottage, parts of which are over 700 years old and, as it turned out, channelling 700 years of ankle-biting draughts.  It also has a pool, which on first sight left me feeling rather breathless with awe.  I don’t know anyone who has a swimming pool, especially in Norfolk.  It turned out to be freezing cold and two metres deep with no shallow end, so going for a swim is just a period of time spent trying not to drown or die of hypothermia.  My life is just one big disappointment.

The master bathroom also had a bidet – an item of bathroom furniture that has always fascinated me.  Having something that takes up that much room, and yet serves no purpose other than rinsing your bumhole, seems decadent at best.  I have an aunt in Essex who has one; I remember trying to wash my hands in it when I was small, squirting myself in the eye and assuming it was broken. Later in life I would use a hotel room bidet to throw up in.  It was a low point, in fairness.

Anyway, earlier this week I was discussing this very subject by email with uber-Blogger and very nice man JonnyB, who declared that his definition of a posh house was one with “curtains that opened/closed by means of a string/rope rather than manual pulling. I think this must have been a very Essex thing. But I honestly thought that you’d arrived if you had those.  I did get them at one point. But they were annoying.”

And this made me laugh so much that I crafted a whole blog around it.  Funny how that happens sometimes.