In the 1960s the Morris Minor, by then endowed with the latest indicator technology to show which way the driver intended to
go, still had the ghostly outline of a trafficator etched onto a door panel, like a vestigial fin on a primeval creature emerging from
the deep to walk on land. There was also the Morris Traveller looking like some kind of covered wagon, which a delighted
Edna Everage, newly arrived in England, called "a half-timbered car, possums!" At about the same time, a popular model of
mini was covered in a cane-seating pattern. What image that was meant to conjure up was less clear, but it was not futuristic.
today's equivalent is the Land Rover, a rugged World War II inspired machine often put to its toughest test by the speed
bumps at Brent Cross shopping centre.
The first television sets and gramophones were sometimes hidden away demurely in fake cocktail cabinets. In contrast
computers on the whole have been content to look like bits of typewriter and TVs strung together. That is probably because
they have always been destined for office workers and nerds, neither of whom qualify in the minds of marketing departments
as polite society.
