21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) Read online

  Then, along came Rollerblades, the grey squirrel to the roller skates’ red, and almost overnight it became dreadfully uncool to be seen with four wheels, one at each corner of your foot. A strip of wheels down the middle of a sturdy plastic boot was the only acceptable formation.

  The roller skate was consigned to the dustbin of time, making only occasional appearances since. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s dreadful musical Starlight Express, originally conceived as a roller skate theatrical extravaganza, converted to Rollerblades, and that, as they say, was that.

  Dodo Rating:

  Ring Pulls

  For decades, the holy trinity of pavement litter was cigarette butts, blackened wads of chewing gum, and drink can ring pulls. Since 1989, these have been reduced to a double act only.

  Younger readers, by which I mean anyone under the age of about 30 (most of whom won’t be reading this book anyway), may be unaware that the ring pulls on beverage cans – Coke, Fanta, whatever – used to come right off the can.

  That’s right, clean off.

  They were usually thrown away, often in complete disregard of the little stick man next to a wire bin who wanted us to Keep Britain Tidy, and were a common sight on pavements and kerbsides everywhere.

  This removable ring pull, or pull tab, was invented in 1963 by a man with the wonderful name of Ermal Cleon Fraze. Prior to that time, cans had a variety of opening mechanisms; the most common of which was just to punch two holes in the top. Ermal’s idea quickly caught on and became the standard for many years.

  It was not without its problems, however. The edge of the tab, the bit that looked like a tongue, could be quite sharp and often resulted in cut fingers. This was before the days when everybody sued everybody else for the slightest injury, no matter how bloody stupid the injured party may have been, so that alone did not warrant sufficient reason for change.

  Having been removed, it wasn’t that difficult to pop the ring pull back into the can. Which was a good way to avoid littering the streets but not so great if you forgot it was there and swallowed the blighter.

  And then there was that litter issue. Millions upon millions of ring pulls covered our streets. You couldn’t walk down any suburban road without spotting them. They were the postman’s red elastic bands of their day.

  So in many respects, it was a good thing that the stay-on-tab was invented. Actually, the technology existed as early as 1975 (it was designed by a chap with another splendid name, Daniel F. Cudzik) but it wasn’t adopted as standard in the UK until 1989. By the time the ’90s hit, the road sweepers of Britain had disposed of nearly all the remains, any new sighting causing great excitement, as if it were a historic fossil find.

  But progress does have a way of running roughshod over traditions of cultural importance, and the death of the ring pull is not without its cost.

  We have lost, for example, the ability to disconnect the ring from the tab, slot one into a notch in the other and create a flying saucer/discus/ninja throwing star that zooms across the room. It was a special skill that took, ooh, minutes to learn but years to perfect. I will never be able to pass on this considerable talent to my own children.

  And then there is the small matter of love. Yes, love, I tell you.

  Numerous pretend playground weddings took place between junior school boys and girls, and were marked by the placing of a ring pull on the finger. It was a moment of romantic innocence and we shall not see the likes of it again.

  I think you’ll find that it is a statistical fact that divorce rates have gone up since the ring pull became extinct.

  Coincidence? I think not.

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  Cap Guns

  Before it became frowned upon for small children to walk around pretending to shoot each other with realistic guns that created loud explosions, cap guns were as common as, well, bows and arrows with suction cups on the end.

  For those unfamiliar with the concept (the girls, mainly – sorry, but it’s true), these were toy guns made to look like classic Western revolvers (and sometimes other models) into which you loaded a strip or ring of caps which, when struck by the gun hammer, made a satisfying snappy bang and emitted a puff of smoke, similar to the bang of a Christmas cracker, but with more menace.

  Ring caps were little plastic capsules containing a tiny amount of explosive (so small as to be completely safe) that were pressed into the revolver cylinder and set off one by one when you pressed the trigger. The process of loading them was more like loading a real gun but they only gave you six shots.

  More progressive junior gunslingers used strip caps, a thin paper ribbon punctuated every third of an inch or so with a full stop of explosive. When the hammer hit one of these, the strip advanced along one step ready for the next shot. A strip could hold hundreds of caps, which allowed for lots of rapid-fire action, but did mean your gun always looked a bit odd with what appeared to be a paper streamer flying around behind it.

  Personally, I preferred the strip caps, but only because you could unravel them, spread them across the floor and run a stone along them to let off a whole volley of bangs in one go.

  Whatever your chosen ammunition, it didn’t really matter. Whoever you shot would claim that you missed them anyway.

  Tragically, the kids of today have graduated to real guns, and with those you cannot pretend the bullet missed you.

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  Routemaster Buses

  Although ostensibly a London bus, the Routemaster with its driver/conductor team, hand-rolled route number indicator, and hop-on-hop-off doorway, has become an icon, instantly recognisable across the globe. It is the bus that all toy buses are based on, the bus that children draw with crayons, the bus that is emblazoned across souvenirs and which appears in countless film scenes where the director requires a shot that instantly says ‘London’.

  Remarkably, despite the fact that Routemasters regularly drove up and down London streets until the end of 2005, the last one was manufactured as long ago as 1968. Launched in the late ’50s, they were made for just over ten years; 2,876 rolling off the production line in that time. It is a testament to their robust design and popularity that they hung around for so long.

  Originally, the Routemaster was intended as a replacement for an ageing and expensive fleet of trolley buses and trams. It could hold 64 passengers, which was more than its predecessor, and weighed less, so was much cheaper to run. It was also remarkably light on its feet, making it an easier vehicle to drive. The driver was cut off from the passengers in his own cab at the front, and a separate conductor at the back sold tickets, helped old ladies with their shopping, and gave young scallywags a clip round the ear.

  The most notable feature of the Routemaster was the open platform which allowed passengers to jump on and off, even if the bus wasn’t at a designated stop. This was back in the days when running for a bus was actually quite a good idea because, providing the traffic was slow and you had a reasonable turn of foot, you actually stood a chance of catching up with it and jumping on.

  Of course, the open platform also meant it was a lot easier to fall off, and most Londoners have stories of poor unfortunate travellers who came a cropper. And then there were the cheeky oiks who would jump on for a free ride until the conductor noticed them and shooed them off.

  London Transport started to introduce one-person operated buses in the 1970s, with many single-deckers being put into operation, but the Routemaster still hung on to many routes, especially in the centre of London. Even privatisation in 1984 didn’t kill them off, with many of the new companies refurbishing these buses from the ’60s and giving them a fresh lease of life.

  In fact, these legendary vehicles survived well into the 21st century, when the then mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, ordered their decommissioning. This coming from a man who, just a few years before, had said that ‘only some sort of ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of Routemasters’. To be fair, the main reason for the move was the need for disa
bled access to buses – the one thing the Routemaster could not offer.

  The last route to be served by a Routemaster was the 159 from Marble Arch to Streatham, and the final journey took place on 9 December 2005. Such was the public interest that crowds flocked the route and sometimes even blocked the road. Hundreds of people turned up to bid a much-loved bus a fond farewell.

  The Routemaster has not completely vanished. In London they are used for two special heritage routes, the 9 from Olympia to Aldwych and the 15 from Trafalgar Square to Tower Hill. There are also examples of the vehicle elsewhere in the country, with many local firms buying up stock as it was decommissioned. So there is still a chance to see a few of them for a while yet.

  And in 2012, the new London mayor, Boris Johnson, will be introducing an updated version of the Routemaster. The sleek new design is very modern, but keeps the classic open platform – something old, something new.

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  Bus Conductors

  ‘Fares, please!’

  When is the last time you heard that cry? I suspect you’ll be hard pushed to remember. I am willing to bet it was some considerable time ago.

  Next time you find yourself singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ to a child, and at some point in your life that is pretty much bound to happen, stop when you get to this line:

  ‘The conductor on the bus says, “move along please”.’

  And ask the child what a bus conductor is. They won’t know!

  We are all aware why there are no longer any bus conductors; since the privatisation of public transport, companies have tried to save money and operating a bus with one person costs less than employing two, but the slow extinction of the role has sort of gone unnoticed.

  The bus conductor’s main job was, obviously, to sell and check tickets, but the role was much bigger than that. Think about that name, conductor, like in an orchestra. He or she would organise their passengers into some kind of order. They would make sure everyone who needed a seat could get one, that nursery rhyme cry of ‘move along please’ would ensure new passengers could get on, they would make certain that smoking only took place on the top deck, that unruly schoolkids got a clip round the ear to keep them in check, that fare dodgers were kicked off, that everyone knew what stop was coming up, and, something people tend to forget, they would keep the driver in check, quite happy to have words if he was going too fast or turning corners too sharply.

  The bus conductors did their best to instil order and safety. They were, much of the time, a reassuring presence. Now you think about it, you probably realise that you miss them.

  But worry not, they might be back. The new Routemaster buses due for London are supposedly going to have conductors on board. I, for one, would welcome them back.

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  Playing in the Streets

  In his excellent book, How to Live Dangerously, author and social commentator Warwick Cairns points out that our modern-day fears for child safety are largely nonsense. He calculated that if you actually wanted your child to be abducted, then you’d have to lock them out of the house for close to 200,000 years before they would (statistically) be taken.

  And even then, the chances are they’d be returned within 24 hours.

  Now, I don’t want to belittle the many horrible things that happen to children, but the facts are that the vast majority of them happen inside the home, and are caused by members of the family. Playing outside, I would argue, is no less safe than it ever was. And yet children growing up today have less freedom to do so than ever before.

  I grew up in the 1970s. I was allowed to play outside my house, a quiet but not secluded suburban street, from an early age. I was walking to school on my own by the time I was about seven or eight. And this was not in any way remarkable at the time. At ten I would spend most of the weekend out of the house, visiting friends, down the park, or climbing trees. As long as I was home for lunch and dinner, no one seemed to mind. Blimey, when I was eleven, I had a two-hour journey to school that involved a bus and a train – and that train was one of the old ones where you could open the doors at any time, and with carriages full of schoolkids, they were pretty much open for most of the journey.

  Nowadays, allowing your seven-year-old to walk to school alone can result in disapproving comments from other parents, a local newspaper headline, and a radio phone-in.

  I remember some years ago allowing my young son to go unaccompanied to the toilet in a restaurant. The people we were with were astounded that I could be so reckless: they were assuming that some nutter was lying in wait to abduct him in a branch of Pizza Express.

  What has become of us?

  The world is no more dangerous now than it was when I was young; if anything, it is safer. Cars are safer, roads are safer, neighbourhoods are safer – and yet kids under the age of eight are rarely allowed outside unaccompanied. Forgive the rant, but I fear for the sort of mollycoddled children we are raising today. Danger and risk are a part of life. Exposure to them helps us to judge and react to them. It builds our common sense. They are, I would argue, essential to growing up.

  We should allow our children to play in the streets, climb trees, walk to school, play down the park, cycle round the neighbourhood, go to the corner shop, etc. They will become better adults as a result.

  I was chatting about this very subject with an elderly lady a while ago. She told me how, in the late 1940s, she and her sister, both under 14 at the time, had travelled to Norway alone to visit family friends. Their parents waved them off at the garden gate and didn’t see them again for nearly a month. They negotiated a train and ferry to Norway and then the journey through a foreign country to their destination and no one batted an eyelid. If that happened today, the parents would be arrested.

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  Election Vans with Loudspeakers

  Before the days of 24-hour news channels, Twitter, and all things internet-related, politicians had to really put in some graft if they wanted to be elected. There was the door-to-door canvassing, the kissing of babies, and driving around in a van that had a loudspeaker on the roof.

  It sounds daft now, if you have never seen such a thing, but it was standard procedure at the time. Seriously.

  A big speaker or loudhailer would be strapped to the roof of an available vehicle, and the prospective MP would be driven around town while trying to convince people to vote for him or her. Usually this involved inspired and unforgettable rhetoric, such as, ‘Vote for Peter Jones, I’m the man for you’ or some such nonsense.

  It was like the ice cream van of your nightmares.

  Usually the arrival of said van would be greeted by jeers from builders hanging off scaffolding (if it was a Tory candidate) or a disapproving look from posh women in headscarves (if Labour). I presume it must have had some effect, though, as politicians did it for years.

  Now they just poke you on Facebook or something.

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  Nuns

  There simply aren’t as many nuns as there used to be, and their numbers are declining at an alarming rate. During the time John Paul II was Pope, the total of Catholic nuns dropped by a quarter. Between 2005 and 2006 (the most recent statistics available) the number of men and women belonging to religious orders declined by 10% – that was in one single year!

  The reasons for this are obvious and twofold. First, and this isn’t meant to sound flippant, lots of them are dying as they are an ageing population. Second, fewer women are choosing to dedicate their life to their God in this way. This combination means that nuns really are an endangered species.

  Prior to the 21st century, most towns of a reasonable size would have some nuns knocking around. They were a bit of a novelty, I grant you, but not an uncommon sight. The arrival of a group of nuns in a public place would have an amusing effect on those around. Schoolboys and girls would often have a fit of giggles, women would look on curiously, and even the roughest bloke would turn into a true gentleman, ‘Let me get the
door for you sister’ and that sort of thing. They would, usually, brighten up the immediate vicinity and leave politeness in their wake.

  Now you are more likely to spot one on a Nuns Having Fun calendar than in the butcher’s buying a pound of sausages.

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  Telephone Boxes

  When you think about it, it is a bit odd to get all misty-eyed about objects that were more often than not vandalised, frequently littered with prostitute calling cards, and usually smelt of piss. But there is no accounting for nostalgia, it is a powerful beast.

  There are, of course, still telephone boxes around, but nowhere near as many as there used to be. And for good reason – no one uses them any more.

  A recent survey revealed that only 3% of British adults had used a payphone in the past month. Statistics from Wales (hey, I take whatever I can get when it comes to stats) show that a quarter of phone boxes in the country made, on average, fewer than one call a month.

  The reason for this is both obvious and understandable: 90% of adults own mobile phones. Mobile tariffs have become cheaper, with most people paying a certain amount a month to cover a bundle of calls and texts, and there just isn’t the need to nip to a phone box any more.

  So who is using them?

  Well, the 10% of adults who do not own a mobile are certainly high on the list. As are foreign workers calling home. International calls on mobiles are still prohibitively expensive, so many of the migrant workers living in the UK find it cheaper to call from a phone box.

  There is also the element of privacy. If you are lucky enough to find a classic red phone box, then you will be locked within a soundproof booth of cast iron, and passers-by will struggle to hear a word you say. For this reason they remain popular with individuals of a less savoury nature who ‘need to speak to a man about a dog’, or something like that.

  But phone box use is plummeting, and long gone are the days when, and some of you will remember that this did actually happen, there would be a queue outside the local public telephone, with some old bloke getting impatient with the teenager calling his girlfriend from inside and taking ages to say goodbye. Older readers will also remember the days when the phones accepted 2p, a couple of which would more than cover the cost of your call. Minimum charge is 60p nowadays. Last time I used one, it was 20p.