Monochrome Breakfast
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
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Please forgive the black and white tone of this week's blogs, but I couldn't resist showing you this little gem. If nothing else it proves that photographing breakfasts isn't an entirely modern preoccupation (blogs passim). This is of 1936 vintage, taken in a brick and flint country cottage. I know this because the photograph is from a little album (entitled 'Snapshots' and sold by C.B.Keene of Derby) that has turned up in yet another box of oddments. I've no idea if the people in it are relations, or whether I just idly picked it up in a shop, but the photographs show what looks like a couple on holiday in the Peak District. This breakfast scene is printed on 'Velox' paper, which I thought was a Vauxhall, and is rich in detail. High spot on the high table is the half empty jar of what the Unmitigated Laboratory has ascertained to be Wm.P.Hartley's Marmalade. Either the host or, if the lensman is the bloke, his wife, is seen as a ghostly apparition outside the front door (which incidentally is eerily identical to my own). I can look at this scene for a long time, a very rare insight into the 1930's breakfast table amongst the more usual coy snapshots of anonymous people relaxing on a week off. It brings to mind those lines from John Betjeman's Summoned by Bells, remembering just such a scene from his Cornish holidays: Nose! Smell again the early morning smells: Congealing bacon and my father's pipe...
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