Curtains be gone

I'm always fascinated as to what made me so
interested in Interior design and more specifically
in curtains, I remember every time my mother
redecorated any of our 'downstairs' rooms it would
often consist of a mail order catalogue being
ordered from a company called Listers this would
include rows and rows of columns indicating the
cost of different sized curtains and a waterfall of
tiny colour samples of the actual velvet fabrics. I loved looking at these for hours and looking at all the different rich shades and planning in my head room scenes for the different colours, as I knew by all the rooms in our house my mother would fall in love with a blue shade and that is what would be ordered, she rarely deviated away from the colour blue! I can remember this room clearly it would have been in the early 80's and consisted of a blue/ivory damask style flocked wallpaper, a blue Dralon sofa with a matching tasseled trim, blue velvet curtains with cream tassle tiebacks on a teak pole and a very busy blue patterned axminster carpet which my mother often reminded us were very expensive! I even remember the five arm brass light fitting with matching blue silk tasselled shades, which my Aunt informed my mother looked as though it had been taken from draculas castle! Well once again I have waffled on the point being What had happened to Listers? as I couldn't believe anybody would still be ordering velvet curtains in 2008! Sadly I was right the mills had been abandoned in 1992 due to a change in trends and stiff foreign competition, sad to think that the company that had once made the velvet robes for King George v's coronation, and new drapes for the white house in the 70's was no more. The only good to come from such an amazing history is that the former mill building's have been converted to beautiful apartments, I do hope there is a museum or something on the site to tell of the buildings great heritage. LONG LIVE THE CURTAIN!