Yum-yum linoleum

Somewhere, sometime in the 1960s, I wandered into a general store to buy a loaf of bread, or some such mundane item. Their floor stopped me in my tracks. It was black, with a pattern of lozenges, circles, squares and triangles in colours like lime green, strawberry pink, orange, mint blue…I stood staring at the linoleum, mouth watering for the printed-on candies, until a nudge from some grown-up person sent me back to the great outdoors.

The idea of pure, random shape as art has been with us since Kasimir Malevich painted a black square on a white background. He belonged to the Supremacists, artists who sought to dissociate their paintings from the ‘real’ world. No doubt they found freedom in their floating shapes, after the material excesses and bombastic promise of ‘moral improvement’ of Victorian times.

We carry the meditative legacy of Malevich, Popova and Rodchenko today. We have this triumvirate to thank for polka dots, and candy stripes, gingham checks and those wonderful, jazzy triangles of the 1960s. Brightly-coloured, irreducible shapes in combo are visual music, redolent of fun, youth, innocence, summer days on the beach and impromptu parties on winter nights – just think candy canes, drinking straws, spotted beakers and metal-foil party hats. It is no surprise that the moniker of Tate Modern was a series of regularly spaced dots in Smartie-bright colours.

Which brings me round again to my opening theme – forget your subtle, mock-terracotta and ceramic floor coverings. I like a kitchen lino that looks good enough to eat.

What's new, pussycat?

I have upon my main dining table an array of coasters, you know, those tough little mats that stop cups and glasses from coming in contact with beautiful surfaces. However, I often come in for comments from guests because I leave my entire complement of the things on the table, all the time. My reply is that they all feature, in one form or another, the shape of that designed dream of an animal, the cat.

I don’t see why my collection of cat-mats should be locked away, deprived of air and light, and depriving me of the daily joy of contemplating the little darlings. There they are, receptive to any drink you may care to plonk upon them. This has set me thinking; why are we so unimaginative in our attitude towards coasters? The first set I ever saw was when I was a little ‘un and visiting a neighbour’s house. I was astonished by this picture of horses, hounds and huntsmen in red coats gracing their table, several times over.

Down through the years, I’ve seen them all; country houses, wild flowers, US presidents – I’ve learned, at least, that all the coasters in a set do not have to look the same. There is so much more we could do with coasters. Why not have LCD ones where punters can watch cartoon animations or even feature-length movies? Or even mats that play a musical jingle every time someone puts a drink on top? The possibilities are endless. In these stricken times, the Crazy Coaster Company may provide the basis for some designer’s business empire.

Nobody's going to the moon

This week, a report in the main evening news stated that soon, there will be batteries on the market that will enable ordinary household appliances, laptops and mobile phones, to re-charge in a matter of minutes, rather than hours. This will cut fuel bills and help usher in that long-promised but never quite delivered age of electric-powered motorcars.

Even if I had spent the past three decades awaiting that mode of transport with baited breath – I have not – I’m not exactly gagging for fast-charge batteries. Many years ago, during the 1970s and 1980s, I used to eagerly await a weekly television programme, Tomorrow’s World, where a team of friendly presenters would assure us it was all going to happen; jet-packs to propel us everywhere, thereby eschewing the need for either private cars or public transport. We were going to take our holidays on the moon and employ an army of robots to tackle our nasty, yucky housework. Sound wave emissions were going to knock the crud from our so-sweaty skins and vitamin pills and drinks were going to replace food, thereby rendering the art of cooking obsolete. Well…..

Sometimes, you can only laugh. There is no need to point out the shed-loads of celebrity and wannabe chefs that grace our telly screens, the desperate overcrowding on rail carriage and on road, the growing demand for that ever-scarcer commodity, water. Robots are encroaching more and more closely onto areas where once, only the human brain dared to go and all the while, we struggle with the messy necessity of housework. World hunger is still with us, as is infectious disease, the bed bug and holidaying in Lanzarote….I can’t go on! The list is too depressing. How did we get it so wrong?

Our humanity is saved only by the mass communication system that allows us to exchange ideas on all of this, i.e., grumble.