It’s good to be home, but my parents have rearranged my room.
Knowing them as I do I'd give long odds on them converting it into a gymn, but it is the irreversible, ‘Well, you’ve moved out’ process, and there’s not a lot I can do to try and keep it in the finely balanced apocalyptic state that it held for all those years.
They’ve given away my desk and cleared out all my notes from behind my sofa, unearthing a crop of small, empty and forgotten vodka bottles from my teenage years (oops). They also cleared out under the bed.
Aah, the bed.
So many years’ crap, accumulated, distilled and covered with a thick layer of dust. Wonderful. The train set. The Scalectrix (Le Mans 24 hour Special Edition!). The Space Crusade game that I asked for one Christmas at the age of 11 and we never figured out how to play. About two hundred ‘Flight’ and ‘Air Monthly’ magazines, inherited from my Grandpa. The Harmsworth Self Educator.
Now this is something worth seeing. I was 12, and I bought the HSE at my school's Summer Fete. I staggered across the school field with about five of the ten volumes, looking for my parents so I could put them in the car. I recieved a ‘Oh God what crap has he bought now’ look, but they never breathed a word of it.
My wonderful parents.
The New Harmsworth Self Educator is a set of ten books designed to provide a complete education. They cover subjects as diverse as modern languages, cutting edge physics, medicine, mathematics and great achievements in the sphere of engineering, through to lessons on morality, philosophy, religion and ethics. It is one company’s attempt to cram the whole sum of human knowledge into a set of books so that readers could have a go at learning the lot, and as such, it represents a snapshot of the world at one period in time.
The reason that all of this is so interesting is because the day the Harmsworth Self Educator came off the press was in 1914.
There is a chapter in the first volume on choosing a suitable wife for a man’s station in life. There are sections in the later volumes on the very latest steam boilers...typewriting as a business, and how a spoonful of strychnine at night quickens the pulse and simulates exertion for those too busy for daily exercise.
Flicking through these books is very much like stepping back in time. A short essay on bootmaking by mechanical means shows waistcoated men in flat caps and moustaches standing proudly next to their marvellous equipment, next to photographs on plates from the furthest-flung corners of empire showing how rubber is harvested. A photograph of the young men of a cavalry regiment sits chillingly next to a chapter on ‘National Character’ describing the camaraderie between the British and the Germans.
It’s an education, but probably not the one the editors had in mind.
And it's been under my bed for about ten years.
Ooops again.
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