Maybe I ought to have called this post "Thrift versus Needless Consumerism." It seems that 'consumerism' per se isn't quite as negative an expression as I thought. But you'll get the point. Having just finished typing it and having re-read it through, I have to say it's a bit of a treatise rather than simply a blog post this time.
My beloved and I were talking about furniture yesterday and the whole 'cultural differences' thing entered the conversation again. It's broadly true to say that, certainly in the UK these days, people generally change their dining suite at whim, don't they? A lot more people than ever before seem to have as their hobby the continual re-decorating of their home, room-by-room, which often involves, not simply a can of interior emulsion or couple of rolls of wallpaper, but the complete replacing of all the hard furniture in the room that's under transformation. Witness the spate of interior design programmes on UK TV in recent years.
Thus the increase in huge 'sheds', as one tends to call those gigantic furniture stores that pepper all the edge-of-town shopping malls these days. If people in the UK had the same habits as most of the Greeks we know, then lots of those huge chain stores would be out of business. Greeks, in general, own a dining suite for life. Not just for life, but they often use the same suite today that their grandparents handed down to them through their parents along the way.
And it's usually heavy mahogany stuff like this (although often even darker wood)...
That's pretty much par for the course in a lot of Greek households. Plus, quite a few families we know also have custom-made see-thru PVC covers on the chairs. Just what you need on an August day in Rhodes, eh?
Our friend Voula, who I was talking about in the post "Staying Awhile," is a fairly modern woman, yet she too has a lounge/dining room crammed with heavy, darkwood furniture, including a huge glass dresser/sideboard. One wonders whether the standard chipboard floor in a modern UK home would stand the weight for long. No wonder Greek houses have solid floors. My wife's relatives in Athens also have a house crammed with the stuff. Frankly, when one considers the size of the rooms in a lot of 'starter-homes' in the UK nowadays, they'd never even get it in there in the first place.
One of my favourite comedians, "Basile," who I've mentioned before, in the post "Nice Piece of Furniture" for example, did a wickedly funny piece about his ya ya's sideboard and old cabinet-style TV set. I mention it in more detail in that post, which also majors on the whole lace 'doily' thing.
In some ways the Greek way is much better for the environment, if not for the economy. Let's face it, it's a sorry world where 'planned obsolescence' is required to keep a country's, nay the world's, economy going. Nowhere is 'planned obsolescence' more evident than in the computer industry. My iPad, for example, is five years old and already there are loads of apps that I can't download or update because it won't let me update the OS to the latest version because they've made subtle changes to the processor so that it won't cope with the newer system. When you actually stop and think about how this whole planet's financial system depends on industry (and thus mass-employment) rather than small-holding agriculture (as was the case for millennia before our era), you realise that the 'system' is designed to destroy the environment really.
Cultural mores that we abandoned decades ago in more 'developed' countries are still only just making inroads into some aspects of life in rural Greece. Even the house one lives in, when I was a kid, was just about still the family 'base' for generations. Nowadays in the UK even the expression 'starter home' betrays the culture of perpetually moving on to something bigger and better. A house is no longer a home, it's a material asset to be disposed of at a profit as one continually 'moves up the ladder' as it were. Experts in human behaviour and emotional wellbeing, though, ring alarm bells, saying that perpetually moving house tends to sever a human's sense of roots, of belonging, resulting in less balanced people, more emotionally prone to mental distress and other problems as they get older.
Here in Greece, especially in rural Greece, families never sell a house. They'd almost prefer to leave it empty, should a 'set' of forbears die without having anyone to leave it to who'd want to live in it, than sell it on. At most they'll perhaps let it, but it's a home. It was the place to which all the kids and grandkids, even great grandkids could come back to, thus grounding them, giving them a sense of belonging, of having roots.
And I like that. Thus it is with furniture too. Most Greeks I know in the south of Rhodes (OK, so it is changing among apartment-dwelling townies these days) have well-made furniture in every room of the house which is designed to outlive not one, not two, but several generations.
Of course, I'm a hypocrite in some ways because, had I been born into a Greek family and inherited a great big heavy dark wood dining suite that I absolutely hated, I'd probably have to get shot of it and buy something I could live with aesthetically.
But I'm not saying that would necessarily make me any happier for it.
My beloved and I were talking about furniture yesterday and the whole 'cultural differences' thing entered the conversation again. It's broadly true to say that, certainly in the UK these days, people generally change their dining suite at whim, don't they? A lot more people than ever before seem to have as their hobby the continual re-decorating of their home, room-by-room, which often involves, not simply a can of interior emulsion or couple of rolls of wallpaper, but the complete replacing of all the hard furniture in the room that's under transformation. Witness the spate of interior design programmes on UK TV in recent years.
Thus the increase in huge 'sheds', as one tends to call those gigantic furniture stores that pepper all the edge-of-town shopping malls these days. If people in the UK had the same habits as most of the Greeks we know, then lots of those huge chain stores would be out of business. Greeks, in general, own a dining suite for life. Not just for life, but they often use the same suite today that their grandparents handed down to them through their parents along the way.
And it's usually heavy mahogany stuff like this (although often even darker wood)...
That's pretty much par for the course in a lot of Greek households. Plus, quite a few families we know also have custom-made see-thru PVC covers on the chairs. Just what you need on an August day in Rhodes, eh?
Our friend Voula, who I was talking about in the post "Staying Awhile," is a fairly modern woman, yet she too has a lounge/dining room crammed with heavy, darkwood furniture, including a huge glass dresser/sideboard. One wonders whether the standard chipboard floor in a modern UK home would stand the weight for long. No wonder Greek houses have solid floors. My wife's relatives in Athens also have a house crammed with the stuff. Frankly, when one considers the size of the rooms in a lot of 'starter-homes' in the UK nowadays, they'd never even get it in there in the first place.
One of my favourite comedians, "Basile," who I've mentioned before, in the post "Nice Piece of Furniture" for example, did a wickedly funny piece about his ya ya's sideboard and old cabinet-style TV set. I mention it in more detail in that post, which also majors on the whole lace 'doily' thing.
In some ways the Greek way is much better for the environment, if not for the economy. Let's face it, it's a sorry world where 'planned obsolescence' is required to keep a country's, nay the world's, economy going. Nowhere is 'planned obsolescence' more evident than in the computer industry. My iPad, for example, is five years old and already there are loads of apps that I can't download or update because it won't let me update the OS to the latest version because they've made subtle changes to the processor so that it won't cope with the newer system. When you actually stop and think about how this whole planet's financial system depends on industry (and thus mass-employment) rather than small-holding agriculture (as was the case for millennia before our era), you realise that the 'system' is designed to destroy the environment really.
Cultural mores that we abandoned decades ago in more 'developed' countries are still only just making inroads into some aspects of life in rural Greece. Even the house one lives in, when I was a kid, was just about still the family 'base' for generations. Nowadays in the UK even the expression 'starter home' betrays the culture of perpetually moving on to something bigger and better. A house is no longer a home, it's a material asset to be disposed of at a profit as one continually 'moves up the ladder' as it were. Experts in human behaviour and emotional wellbeing, though, ring alarm bells, saying that perpetually moving house tends to sever a human's sense of roots, of belonging, resulting in less balanced people, more emotionally prone to mental distress and other problems as they get older.
Here in Greece, especially in rural Greece, families never sell a house. They'd almost prefer to leave it empty, should a 'set' of forbears die without having anyone to leave it to who'd want to live in it, than sell it on. At most they'll perhaps let it, but it's a home. It was the place to which all the kids and grandkids, even great grandkids could come back to, thus grounding them, giving them a sense of belonging, of having roots.
And I like that. Thus it is with furniture too. Most Greeks I know in the south of Rhodes (OK, so it is changing among apartment-dwelling townies these days) have well-made furniture in every room of the house which is designed to outlive not one, not two, but several generations.
Of course, I'm a hypocrite in some ways because, had I been born into a Greek family and inherited a great big heavy dark wood dining suite that I absolutely hated, I'd probably have to get shot of it and buy something I could live with aesthetically.
But I'm not saying that would necessarily make me any happier for it.
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