(remember the days of the) old

I could have spent all day in the Kalk Bay Trading Post. If ever you’re looking for what you couldn’t find, pay a visit to that village and live for a while in quaint wonderland and the Curiosity shops.

Objets d’art.

The place is so instilled with Retroversity, you can feel it in the pots and kettles hanging from painted walls, down the narrowest alley ways with cobble stones, the vibe and energies, the swinging shop signs, bric a brac piled outside, to the ceiling and behind glass case. I would smile all day at antique spoons, Wedgwood china in dusty windows, telephones from the 50’s (you, know, the kind with the dial and shiny black receiver), gramophones (oh the golden flower!) just vintage. Oh so BoHo.
Up the stairs into the 1960’s where you find posters of old Vogue, LP vinyl bags and Marilyn resurrected. Those the wire words, chic chic chic, antique collectables – an amalgamation of artists in one sea side village, wartime posters of Drink delicious Coca Cola, radios, small liquor bottles (some still half empty). I saw colored glass bottles lined upon the window sill. I ate in a café devoted to Fauvism and Henry Matisse, complete with those bright colors of red, yellow and blue he uses in his paintings. I paged through a 1964 edition of Women’s Weekly and its sewing patterns, reminded of changing roles in society, elapsed popular culture meshed with the present, dinky toys, collectable phone cards raising awareness to the average person about AIDS and ecological devastation (‘No earth, no tomorrow’). These are the old keepsakes mementos, memories and remindings of what has passed, but still lives and breathes in all the essence of a preservation of beauty and art and all things novelty. Old tins become novelties of pop culture, Hulletts sugar, Glen teabags or Lucky Star pilchards. We’ve all seen it before, but only in this magical place can things like these become worth looking at twice It’s the whole knew revelation of it, you see things differently. It’s not the brash, cold hard plastic consumerism we’re subjected to day after day. This is the charm of individual thinking, touches of each art-befuddled mind that make it the trendiest quirk on the coast.
Oh, the railway line, the old station. The quarter and wood-finished book store with books stacked high to the ceiling. It’s the adverts in shop windows for shows at the theater, like ‘don’t understand me.’ The shops next to the ice cream store are obliged to put up signs on the door saying ‘no ice cream in here please.’

Regards,

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