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.
Denne historien er fra January 22, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra January 22, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
