Times have changed for sure. Most of the things we do and the way we carry them out nowadays resemble little or not at all how they were done in the past. It is difficult for your car, your toaster, or the clothes you wear to trigger a remembrance; to take you back in time to better days. There's just not that sense of keeping things around and keeping alive old habits.
Granted that today most of us shave by ourselves, when in the olden times we would go to a barber (and make more of an occasion of it). Still I take some comfort in recreating a ritual that my grandfather carried out in the same way before me. I just started shaving with Geo F Trumper's shaving cream and this just added a new dimension to the whole wet-shaving idea.
I can't shake the thought of the amount of tradition that Trumper carries. That a guy (OK, a gentleman) in the late 1800s was getting the same shave (only exponentially better because he actually got it at Curzon Street) as I get today is a rare treat if you really think about it.
Of course, it is only natural that we should crave these things; more meaningful rituals, grounded in the past, going back to our roots. We have become too focused on progress, too cynical, too impersonal.
I have had the pleasure of eating fresh fruit, straight from the land, of drinking raw milk. Shaving with an old-style double-edge and a shaving cream with a formula that might be older than me feels close to that; taken from another era, close to perfection (because, hey, I'm still not on Curzon Street).
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