You're gonna hear me roar

At the dawn of a new decade, Ysenda Maxtone Graham sets out her wishlist for the 2020s and Victoria Marston discovers the icons that made the 1920s such a roaring success

- Victoria Marston

LET’S learn to smile again. Proper, uninhibited, tooth-displaying 1920s smiles, like the ones we see in any footage of the period, always set to the backdrop of jaunty jazzpiano music. Those people on the streets in hats, drinking cocktails in nightclubs or jumping off an omnibus to go shopping in Piccadilly—they were always smiling.

What happened to our smiles in the early 2000s? Pouting Victoria Beckham must take partial responsibility for spreading the belief that smiling in public is deeply uncool. Daniel Craig didn’t help, either. Let’s scrap that deadpan trend and let our smiles—infinitely orthodontically improved since the crooked smiles of 100 years ago— shine out into the world.

Having re-learned to smile in the first few weeks of this new decade, let’s make the rest of it roar. I don’t mean roar with pain, roar with anger or be roaring drunk. I mean roar in the Roaring Twenties sense of roaring fun. Let’s knock on our friends’ doors in the evening and be welcomed in for a spontaneous party. Let’s motor out to a railway bridge at midnight to watch the night sleeper to Penzance fly by underneath. Let’s put loud vinyl records on at home and dance after supper on a weekday. (Spotify will do fine, in a pinch.) If you’re vaguely thinking, ‘it would be nice to hold a party in the last week of January’, go on, write those invitations and send them as hard copies by post to cheer up this country’s too-Minimalist chimneypieces. Inspired by the 1920s, let’s make the 2020s the time for celebrating friendships.