Antiques while you wait

Spotted in a charity shop. I managed to stop myself from buying it.

H.I. and me have always despised containers which have helpful suggestions as to what to put inside them written boldly (or even discreetly) on the outside. I can't even stand bread-bins with the word 'bread' printed onto them. I think it was Cro who - years ago - acquired a wooden bread-board with the word 'braed' carved into it. Now that one I would have liked.

We know someone who has a canvas bag hanging from a hook in their bathroom on which is printed 'Loo Rolls', in very large letters. She uses it to store spare rolls of toilet paper, just in case the dispenser runs out, if you hadn't guessed. Quite what is wrong with putting them on the window ledge like everyone else, I don't know - maybe she just saw the bag in a gift-shop one day, and never realised until that moment that she needed it, or that such an item ever existed.

That is my main problem with things that are inanely labeled to describe their function - there is no need for them. There are enough pointless and ugly things in the world as it is, so why make more? At least in Greece there is a good excuse to throw china items out of the window once a year, but once something like the above has found it's way onto the shelf of a British household, it is destined to become a family heirloom to be handed down and cherished by generations to come. I almost bought it simply to take outside and smash, but I think that my behaviour would have been misconstrued as the act of a madman, and not the carefully considered action of an arbiter of good taste with a sense of aesthetic civic duty.

We broke an awful lot of china in Dresden during WW2, thereby hiking the prices up for all the antique-dealers thereafter, but when the People's Republic of China itself began dealing with us rampant capitalists, every man, woman, child and dog could afford a nice piece of blue and white to adorn the mantle-piece of their kennel because it's manufacture and import cost peanuts - just so long as you ordered enough of the horrible stuff. If there was no market for it which wasn't created simply by it's production, then the entrepreneur (that word which George W Bush said that the French have no word for) did not lose his shirt.

I saw something in the window of a bathroom shop once which made me stop and look closer. It was a little rope-ladder made from slats of natural wood, strung together with fine, white cord. The idea was that you attached one end of it to one of the bath taps, and let the other down into the bath so that any spider unfortunate enough to fall in could make it's own way out by climbing up it.

A small hand-written label next to it read, 'Hand made in China by bemused craftsmen'.