Back in the late 1960s I had some relations whose home was far more like the homes that you saw on TV or in the movies than our house was.
They had a colour TV, a 'studio couch' (without arms- coarse brown plaid fabric), dynamic looking lightshades, a 'hi-fi' with seperate loudspeakers (we had a radiogram), an aquarium, a shaggy rug, ice cubes...
I took all of these things to be the hallmarks of sophistication, signs that these people had somehow escaped from the austerity in which my branch of the family seemed terminally stuck.
But of these trappings the one that I have the strongest memory is the soda siphon.
They had a colour TV, a 'studio couch' (without arms- coarse brown plaid fabric), dynamic looking lightshades, a 'hi-fi' with seperate loudspeakers (we had a radiogram), an aquarium, a shaggy rug, ice cubes...
I took all of these things to be the hallmarks of sophistication, signs that these people had somehow escaped from the austerity in which my branch of the family seemed terminally stuck.
But of these trappings the one that I have the strongest memory is the soda siphon.
Theirs was dark green (the model above dates from 1965). Funnily though, I don't think that anybody in the household drank. My cousin and I would play with it, shooting fizzing jets of disapointingly bland and dusty water into sturdy green pimpled tumblers. Other than that I don't think it ever got used.
We collected the empty gas capsules though, and employed them in our Airfix armageddons as weapons of mass destruction, which we ominously called Doom Bombs or Blockbusters.
