Crown Glass
Conception
My parents were the lone holdouts in their cul-de-sac against the tyranny of double glazing for the entirety of my childhood. For those endless years my friends luxuriated in their warm, well-insulated homes while I half-heartedly mopped a gallon of condensation from my windowsill every morning.
Instead of daffodils and egg hunts my memories of Spring are of my father plugging the rot in the wooden window frames with putty in a Ship-of-Theseus style hopeless quest while muttering darkly about useless daughters and inefficient sill mopping methods. They didn’t replace the 70s brown bathroom-of-doom until practically the day I moved out either.
Whilst I will eternally hold a grudge about an adolescence spent applying make-up in a poorly lit entirely mud brown bathroom their stubborn insistence on clinging to the windows, I get. For my parents you see had twinkling, beautiful Crown Glass windows.
Crown Glass is glass made by traditional glassblowing where the centre of the sheet has a bulls-eye like lump and towards the edges the glass grows finer. The bulls-eye is the cheaper part of the glass owing to it being thick and opaque and the edges are the better quality glass mostly used for finer homes and businesses.
The Georgian-style windows of my parent’s house were mostly plain but every few panels contained a bullseye. My mother adored them, possibly more than us children. Whenever a double glazing salesperson rang or knocked on the door she would wax lyrical about her beloved glass to the point that the poor unfortunate soul would swear they’d renounce their trade and agree wholeheartedly that only an ingrate would replace those beautiful windows for the plastic monstrosities Her Down The Road had. I don’t recall my dad having the same conversations, he was likely too busy glossing the putty he’d recently applied in the vain hope of matching it to the frame.
Entropy, alas, consumes us all and in the early 2000s my mother finally took pity on my father and his insistence that he could putty no more and installed the double glazing. This blanket, with the little square bullseye panels is my ode to the windows of my youth.
