I was standing at the checkout counter at the Warehouse recently waiting for what seemed to be an inordinate amount of time for the young lady in front of me to have her transaction completed. She was purchasing quite a large amount of bedding and it required her to sign a number of forms. I was about to return my meagre purchases to their original shelving when the proceeding was finally completed and the young lady exited the store with her goods. I asked the checkout operator: “What was that all about?”
She told me that the lady had bought the bedding on layby. This surprised me because in my day if you bought goods on layby the shopkeeper kept the items in store until they were fully paid for. It was an eminently sensible system and in most cases no interest was charged, though in some instances a modest storage fee might be added.
What the young lady with the bedding had actually done was to buy on hire purchase. No doubt a high interest rate was in train and the Warehouse took the risk that the goods would eventually all be paid for. It would be difficult to repossess used bedding.
I can’t help but conclude that the layby system, as we understood it, was a much more sensible procedure and would have taught thrift and frugality in it processes.
I don’t like the expression “in my day” much because all-in-all things are better today than they were and our recollections of the past our usually clouded by tinted memories and we conveniently ignore those aspects that weren't so rosy.
So please excuse my indulgence.
Back “in my day” per head of population New Zealand was considered to be the greatest trading nation in the world, yet the finance ministers of the day were prudent and never allowed us to spend more money than we earned. For instance you couldn’t buy a new car unless you personally had overseas funds. The government did allow some new cars to be available, but these numbers were determined by the amount of the surplus in our offshore accounts.
When I was twenty-one I bought a second-hand Volkswagen that had travelled 14,000 miles. It cost me 914 pounds. A new Volkswagen cost 900 pounds. The Volkswagen dealer might put you on a waiting list for a new vehicle, but only if you had a car to trade-in and he was then able to negotiate the trade-in price from a position of great strength.
So there’s an example of the good and the bad. The government was behaving in a common sense manner by not allowing overseas goods to come in without us being able to meet all our commitments as a nation, but the end result was high prices and limited access.
I am convinced however that there was one thing that was better “in my day” and that was the music. It played an important role in our lives. For amusement in that pre-television era we listened to music on the radio, went to movies described as “musicals” and at parties we stood around pianos and sang.
I’ve looked at today’s music and have concluded that much of it is drug-induced poetry set to tuneless dirges. I suppose this was inevitable. As Julie Andrews lyrically explained to Captain Von Trapp’s kids in The Sound of Music with her hit song Do-Re-Mi, there are only seven notes in the chromatic scale and it was generally assumed that popular music, with so few options available, would eventually run of out of tunes that were original.
I’m convinced that time has come.
I was as proud as any other New Zealander to see Lorde take to the Los Angeles stage and wow a sophisticated audience, but none of the music I heard on the Grammy Awards night could hold a candle to the melodies we grew up with.
I tried to think of a song from “my day” with the same message as Lorde’s Royals and came up with “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” sung by Frank Sinatra and Celeste Holm. Their song sensibly describes in a less complicated manner what I think Lorde had in mind.
It surfaced in the 1956 movie High Society which also starred Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby and the irrepressible Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. Miss Kelly was arguably the most beautiful woman in the world at the time.
Crosby and Kelly sang a romantic ballad called True Love which topped all the hit parades in its day and apart from the Sinatra/Holm duet, Sinatra and Crosby, whom the world has never seen the like of before or since, performed the harmonic “Well, Did You Evah”.
The highlight of the movie for me however was Crosby and Armstrong’s classic rendition of a song called “Now You Has Jazz.”
Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra; now their records were well worth putting aside on layby.
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