They just can't get the glass

They don’t make mirrors like they used to. They just can’t get the glass. I remember a mirror once. Was it last year? No, maybe the year before. No, come to think of it, it must have been longer ago than that.

Well, whenever it was, that was a cracking mirror. Oh a joke, cracking mirror geddit? But it was a cracking mirror. Clean and clear, in a plain frame, honestly reflecting the sunlight of an honest era. I don’t mean it dazzled you with the truth. Truth can be quite blinding really, don’t you think? No this mirror was kinder. It just had a strong luminance. As if it were itself a source of light with, you know, an even brightness.

It was probably the way it had been put together. I’m still trying to work out when it was. Perhaps it was five years ago. Maybe even ten? It was when they still understood about crafting. Whoever made it had obviously taken their time to get it just right. No mass production. No spoor of the Asian tiger there. Must have been a product of the late empire that mirror. Wow, was it really as old as that?

What a reflection. You’d almost call it optimistic. And the silvering on the back. Perfect. Not a blemish. That was quality. Such colours it had. The reds in that mirror were red. And the blues, boy were they blue? Not like today’s mirrors where the colours wither and fade as soon as you look at them and whose dodgy reflectors inflict flecks of silver on even the most vibrant crowning glory.

I can remember where it was if I can’t remember when. That’s right. It was at mum & dad’s. In the hall opposite the grandfather clock where that big picture of the sea is now. But so well made. And true if you know what I mean. You could tell from the grandfather clock’s perpendicularly perfect reflection. These days they all seem to wobble outwards at the centre. So shoddy. I don’t understand why people just don’t take them back.

I know what it was. It was trustworthy. A bit like a butler I suppose. You know, the old family retainer. It’d hang there discreetly attentive while you gave yourself the last once over before meeting your public. The preening point to check that the tie-it-yourself bow tie hadn’t ended up looking like an old sock wrapped round your neck or that the jeans emanated just enough poetic distress to interest a young lady, but were not too mangled to alienate her mother. Boys and their jeans. Was it ever thus?

And while we’re on the subject of sartorial elegance, it was to satisfy that plane of glass that Dad would adjust the rose in his button hole. And where I would resist in squirming embarrassment as the same was inflicted on me. Only for the tight bundle of perfumed petals to be consigned to the hedge during an appropriately radical post exit instant.

Not to be bested in the vanity stakes the ladies used it too. Mum and sister’s frequent final image analysis prior to sorties to Marks and Spencer to buy arm loads of blouses and trousers, skirts, shirts and jackets happened here. As did the twirling and turning, the dipping and zipping and diving, the craning of necks and the stretching of legs and the last yearning gaze the following day when the armfuls all went back. With the whole process to be repeated in a fortnight.

It was one of the family. A confidante you could engage in conversation when you came back, resplendent with alcohol from the pub. A reliable old friend who would give you none of the graininess you see nowadays sneakily replacing a face’s soft peach bloom with something closer to the shell of gnarled old walnut.

No, they don’t make them like they used to, mirrors. They can’t get the glass.

© Patrick Ellis 2006