In the past, texts of a religious or improving nature hung on every cottage wall.
Victorian needlework-samplers might typically remind the occupants to ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’. Thence to basements in the pot-smoking 1970s, where posters of the saccharine poem Desiderata (‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste’) seemed to endorse the passivity of the ‘basementals’ gazing on.
As a teenager, I was very taken with the description of such texts in a fictional household within a world paralysed by genetic mutation.
