Samuel Coleridge wrote about placing a tiny lantern of history on the stern of his ship to illuminate the waters through he sailed. This is what we will have to do for the prefabs!
Prefabs (and perhaps some prefab residents as well) have built-in drawers. One day the curators of the Victoria & Albert Museum will hold a Life in British Prefabs exhibition which will be sure to take Europe by storm. Those curators would give anything for the contents of our prefab's drawers. Take a lucky dip into them today and you could draw out a miniature replica of Juan Manuel Fangio's racing car made out of pieces of Meccano, a night sky map from the London Planetarium, a picture of Welsh international John Charles in his new Juventus football kit, a Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained! Children's Book Club label, an empty box filled with the aroma of the old man's favourite Dutch cigars, a photograph of kids swimming in the baths in Koblenz, a Smoke Gets In Your Eyes hit-record by the Platters. All of these priceless artefacts will vanish away into a Sargasso Sea of lost time when the day of the Big Move comes.
What would Friedrich Nietzsche have made of the prefabs? That was what someone was asking in the jug and bottle of the My Full Moon the other day. The hard man of power often said the weak should perish, so it seems more than likely that he would have wanted our flimsy weak prefab structures to perish as well. Yet in the final days of his life it is possible that he started to have second thoughts. As an old man Nietzsche saw a horse being savagely beaten. Instead of joining in the fun and giving the horse an extra beating he embraced it and started to sob. Perhaps an older wiser Nietzsche would have embraced the prefabs as well. Their transitory life-span makes you want to "redeem the past" and transform "every 'It was' into 'I wanted it thus!'"