We start in the UK. Back in the 1980s Anglepoise lamps became trendy. Of course they weren't real Anglepoises they were just an accessible Ikea copy. For those of you who missed the last century, or who have never been to Ikea, the real Anglepoise lamp is a balanced-arm lamp design in which the joints and spring tension allow the lamp to be moved into a wide range of positions where it will remain without being clamped in position. It was invented by British designer George Carwardine in 1932. The lamps were enormously successful, particularly the 1227 model.
Shift of scene to Spain. One Sunday in 1964, so the story goes, Luis Pérez Oliva, a designer and Pedro Martín, a scrap dealer, met in the Rastro flea market in Madrid and fell into conversation. As a direct result of that meeting the men formed a company called Fase (the first two letters from Fabricaciones Seriadas or Serial Fabrications in English) to produce desktop lamps. Fase went on to be a big success with their most famous model, the President, bagging a bit role in the Madmen TV series as in the photo here.
Now I knew, vaguely, of the real Anglepoise but I knew nothing of Fase until I heard a piece on the radio. The next week in the same slot on the same programme they talked about Caramelos PEZ or PEZ sweets. To get the idea think tic-tacs but not quite. PEZ is an Austrian brand of sweet sold as a little rectangular lozenge. They come in dinky dispensers which hold 12 sweets. The name, PEZ comes from the first flavour the sweets were available in, peppermint or pfefferminz in German. Eduard Haas began to sell these sweets in 1927 and their original market was smokers who wished to mask the smell of smoke. The little dispenser was cigarette lighter shaped and fitted neatly alongside the packet of fags. Over time the company introduced lots more flavours but, more importantly, they designed hundreds of different novelty dispensers. I think one of the first and most famous had a head of Mickey Mouse. The packaging was designed to attract children to the sweets, like Kinder eggs in reverse. Nowadays there is a flourishing market in collectible dispensers.
I'd never heard of either of the companies but it's always good to find out things about the place I now live. The radio suggested that these products were well known in Spain but I've always found that what's common knowledge depends on who you talk to. I must say though that recently I've found out something new from almost every extended conversation I've had with someone Spanish.
I was talking, online, with Susi this morning. I was trying to explain about the British Christmas decorations, both interior and exterior, but especially about exterior lights on houses. This meant that I had to try to explain about where we tend to live in in the UK; about the distribution of housing in cities, towns and the countryside, about town centre gentrification, about where the suburbs begin and so on - the whole nine yards. Have you ever thought how difficult it is to encapsulate the idea of a cottage? Susi, by the way, is not at all anti Christmas but she has no exterior or interior Christmas decorations of any kind in her flat and has never sent or received a Christmas card in her life. She is very young though.
We often think we have shared experiences and that the rich world is pretty standardised, that everything is much of a muchness but, when you get down to the detail, if Spain is anything to go by, the differences are generally unimportant but still quite marked.
