I’m not allowed to write about my mother any more, in case she has enough and decides to protest against the injustice of 25 years of me doing it. It’s a risk, I guess. There comes a point in most people’s lives when they wake up thinking their neighbour has stolen their paying-in book. This would be like that, except true: I have been stealing her best material for a quarter of a century.
Anyway, someone else I know from the prewar generation – born before 1945 – has a new conspiracy theory. (Gen prewar is different from boomers – born between 1946 and 1964 – even though society tends not to distinguish between one pensioner and another, which happens either because society is ageist or because boomers are greedy and want the category to themselves. But we can discuss that another time.)
Gen prewar have different concerns, chief among them being that whatever they are consuming at any given moment is made from the factory-floor offcuts of some other, unnamed product. So, my prewar acquaintance has recently switched from Fruit Pastilles to Randoms and is now convinced that her confection of choice is made from bits of sweets left over in the manufacture of other, better sweets. That is why they are called Randoms.
I should probably just roll over to the proposition, as I was in the habit of stealing her sweets and I preferred Fruit Pastilles. But I’m reminded of the time she told me that sausages were made from the residue of other meat processing and were mainly spine and eyeball. “How come they’re so delicious, then?” I demanded to know. “If spine and eyeball are this delicious, why aren’t we eating them on their own?”
Someone else I know thinks teabags are made from the floor sweepings of another, superior tea process. Anthony Burgess once described the sad, sad smell of “cheap gaspers [cigarettes] made of floorsweepings, floors swept with the aid of damp tea leaves”.
This generation’s conception of the industrial process – for everything – is wild: factory workers wading around knee-deep in the detritus of some product that only elites can buy, while the rest of us mindlessly consume something we think is scotch egg but is actually two parts hoof, one part tea and a ball bearing left over from a car.
It left some scars, the second world war, is all I’m saying. Even for people who experienced it as babies.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
