Recycling

Fashion recycles itself, said my year three school teacher, Miss Kerr, and I have always been of the opinion that she was waiting for her style to return. The one where hair buns and hairy stockings feature heavily.

But despite her lack of taste, she was correct. Humans do think in very circular ways.

Take watches.

In the early twentieth century and before it, a gentleman, and some enterprising women also, kept time pieces. They would wind them and put them in their pockets.

Before the first world war, carrying you watch in you pocket was the only manly thing to do. Only ladies wore wrist watches or 'wristlets'. The common statement made by a modern gentleman being "I should sooner wear a skirt than a wrist watch".

However, the soldiers fighting dreary sodden fights in the trenches were the people to realize that if you want to know the time and simultaneously also don't want a bullet in your brain, you can't be fiddling with a watch in your pocket, or having it fall out and being lost.

So a design was made that was transitional between a pocket watch, and a wrist watch, which many soldiers wore. It was called the trench watch







Over time, such a device was superseded by wrist watches with quarts movement and metal bands, and were popular, as no one could say a wrist watch was unmanly, they being worn by soldiers.

Then came the nineties, and with it mobile phones. The brick phone became the first ever flip phone, and that became the Nokia 3-whatever with a back lit green-black screen, and soon most everyone had a small electrical companion capable of telling the time, date, calculating small numbers, and not least, talking to other people.

For my generation, wrist watches had become redundant. Many young people do wear them, but they are far from necessary.

If you are under twenty five, and you want to know the time, you probably check your pocket watch. It is, as Miss Kerr said, recycling.

What is the point of my little tale? The point is, that the 'modern' thought, isn't modern at all. You've all seen it on tv or the net, "2012, end of the world!" or perhaps, "fuck off we're full!" displayed in a charming fashion on car windows. Hate, fear, they aren't modern. They aren't original. Guess what they thought when the bubonic plague hit? "end of the world!" guess what they thought of Germanic people coming to England?

Only a human would be so arrogant to believe that if all the humans died the world would end.

So please, I'm begging you, think something original. Think something nice.