BRIAN KALLER

Virtually every public and corporate space I visit -- lift, office lobby, grocery store, doctor’s office or petrol station, every space -- has overhead speakers and a piped-in sound system, which has no reason to exist but seems to grow louder each year. Most places play the same twelve songs over and over, but the choice of music is not the main issue. The problem is that most people I know have ceased to notice this background and talk over it --- again, more loudly each year.

No other society has ever performed this kind of giant experiment on themselves over generations, so no one has ever measured the long-term effects. I do know, though, that between the earphones, the MP3 player and the earplugs, a normal life is getting expensive.

If you buy herbal remedies, you are sending money to global corporations – just ones that don’t have to abide by the public rules of pharmaceutical companies, and can sell things that don’t work. I'm neither a doctor nor a politician, but I can think of a number of ways people can improve their and their neighbours' health. They could persuade many people to garden, getting exercise and fresh vegetables. They could persuade lawmakers to force herbal companies to abide by the same standards as pharmaceutical companies.

We tend to think of technology as rock and metal – from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, from pyramids and statues to Viking swords and pirate cannons. We think of the things that survive to be placed in museums, in other words, and tend to neglect the early and important inventions that ordinary people used every day but whose materials did not survive centuries of exposure.

For thousands of years before refrigerators and packaged food, people across the world needed to make food last through the winter. Starches present no problem; dried, grains like wheat and rice can last decades. Vitamins, found in fresh plants and lasting only a short time in the body, present more of a challenge.

Luckily, there are several ways to get fresh vitamins all through the winter, first by fooling the vegetables, as it were, into thinking they’re not dead yet.

The whole story, of course, made more sense when it was gaining popularity in the 19th and early 20th centuries; most children were familiar with sleighs or lumps of coal, and hung their stockings by the chimney anyway, to dry. The oranges we received in our stockings were meaningless to us in the 1970s but precious to our forebears; they were from exotic lands. In “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” Mama was in her kerchief and I in my cap because the houses were cold. Children a century ago would not have found such details cryptic, any more than they would stables and mangers.

Most people these days find the conventions of black-and-white movies as alien as Kabuki theatre, familiar only from decades of countercultural spoofing. Many times I have eagerly attended the rare revival, from "Dark Victory" as a teenager to "Metropolis" last year, only to cringe when the dramatic scenes reduced the audience to horse laughter. Young people might do well to explore old movies, though, for as we enter a time of austerity they might turn out more relevant and prophetic than anyone realises.

When my neighbour brought his horse to the farrier – horseshoe-fitter, pronounced like “carrier” – I sat in to watch and learn, and the farrier seemed happy to answer my many questions. He looked like a teenager, with a face you’d expect to see in a drive-through window, but he wrestled the stallion’s legs and shaped the hot iron like a man who knew his business.

Writers from a century or two ago described recognizing particular barrels, nails or saddles as we would recognize someone’s handwriting, and the craftsman’s reputation hung on the quality of their work. When everyone knew where products came from and could identify the makers of the superior and inferior work, they could reward the hardest-working and most skilled craftsmen with their business – what used to be called capitalism, before the word came to mean the system we have today.

We don’t live near restaurants or city rubbish bins anymore, but we do have rows of hedges, all of which are sagging with fruit and berries this time of year. Most of them rot on the vines or are eaten by birds, and since we feed the birds through the winter, we can take our share in the autumn. A few weeks ago I decided to see how much I could glean from a five-metre stretch of hedgerow, along with some orange peels a co-worker discarded at the office. To preserve them over the winter, I wanted to make them into wine and jelly.

... all crashes are relative. My acquaintances back in the USA tell me that they struggle every day in this economy of high unemployment and fuel prices; I believe them, but I also mention that our unemployment is much higher, and we pay the litre-and-euro equivalent of $8.00 a gallon. Today’s Irish, meanwhile, remain wealthy compared to the Irish of 20 years ago, who might, in turn, have been in the wealthiest half of the world. Yet people lived hearty lives in all these times and places, even when most of them had less money than the underclass of the modern West. Americans' suffering comes not just from a lack of money, but from a lack of training.

What draws most antique lovers is not antiquity itself, I suspect, but craftsmanship, the hours of care and lifetime of skill imbued in the final product. A chair, a knife, or even a toy made before the energy needle often meant an investment of many hours of work by someone who had trained for years to master their craft. Such handiwork might last centuries – we have a desk two hundred years old, for example – and if the work breaks it can be repaired or the pieces replaced.