Handwritten letters
A note written especially for you. By hand. A rare thing, except maybe, perhaps, at Christmastime.
The astrolabe
Once a useful measuring instrument for finding out where you were at sea, perhaps the astrolabe can guide us when the opinion polls are all at sea.
Bye bye, Brides
Bashful brides or canny cohabitors? Probably neither
Thomas Cook
It was in the early hours of the morning of 23 September that the slogan “Don’t just book it, Thomas Cook it” took on a new and wholly unwelcome meaning.
Coal cellars
Once every household aspired to own one. Now they’re just ghosts beneath our feet.
Police boxes
In some ways, they started as refreshment kiosks and returned to their fate as refreshment kiosks.
IBA Engineering Announcements
Always a ghost programme to begin with, the IBA Engineering Announcements are now truly a ghost.
Napster
Disruptive? Napster was certainly that. For a whole two years, it turned the record industry upside down. And made lost songs listenable again.
The hitchhiker
They were once ubiquitous, normal, and accepted. Now, however, the hitchhiker really has vanished.
The Giro
It survives in letters on your paying-in slips. But the Giro as shorthand for a bleak life on benefits is fading from memory. Perhaps for the best.
