Just a few minutes ago I was on my phone, searching up a CD of medieval music to act as interval background atmosphere for the show that as you read this, we’ll be doing up at the Coulsdon Manor Hotel (Shakespeare’s Henry V, details on page 30 & 31 in this magazine – end of gratuitous advertising break). Hitting the ‘Buy Now’ button on the screen, it confirmed that the disc (And if you’re wondering why I’m still using late 20th Century tech on the audio front, and not simply streaming it, you try getting a reliable connection to the internet in the middle of tree-strewn golf course…) would be winging its merry way and arrive the next day. Job done, at least for me. For the pickers and delivery team, it’s just beginning. People will be working what used to be called anti-social hours and careening across the country just to get my piece of plastic within 24 hours of me ordering it. Now, let’s put to one side the question of zero hour contracts and low pay for the moment. But as magical as seems for me to get this level of near instant gratification, it has other effects. It engenders a feeling that somehow it should always be like this. I’ll be honest, there were a couple of other CDs that just might have done the job better than the one I selected. But they would be delivered later. Well, clearly, that’s no good. As Mr Mercury once said ‘I want it all, and I want it now!’. And that’s pretty much the way the world works these days. And to achieve that, we’ve moved, step by step, towards a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, always in motion world. ridiculous in a world of binge-watching box-sets into the early hours. Shops open Monday to Saturday 9am to 5pm with early closing on Thursdays, or sometimes Wednesdays depending on local market days, and never on Sundays, can hardly be comprehended by a generation who queue in their droves for flat pack furniture and DIY supplies on a Sunday morning. But other than making it easier to get ‘stuff’, what actually is all this good for? Instant impulse purchasing may benefit the buyer at one level, but the real winner is the seller, and the multi-billion pound, tax-avoiding intermediary named after a very long South American river (other intermediaries exist, but hey, you name one…). And when shops didn’t open on Sunday, we didn’t starve to death or live without cheap chic Skandi sofas, we just bought them on other days. And here’s the real problem, or at least one of them. We might just have had to think about it. Plan it. And for that you need time. Time, that despite all the labour saving tools we have at our disposal, is seemingly scarcer than ever. I can’t buy any more. I can’t order an extra 12 hours for next day delivery. Welsh poet William Henry Davies wrote in 1911 ‘A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.’ It’s good for us to occasionally stand still, take a few deep breaths, take stock. Chill out, relax. To be honest, if I suddenly became emperor of the world tomorrow (unlikely, but then we have clowns in the White House and Number 10 so it’s not quite as ridiculous an ambition as it once might have been) I’d reintroduce restrictions on Sunday trading. Not for any religious reasons, just so we could, once a week, have the opportunity to not go anywhere, not buy more stuff we didn’t really need, and maybe, just maybe, find that what we really needed wasn’t at the shops at all… TV that always shut down around midnight, sometimes earlier, with the national anthem and a small white dot in a black screen seems Paul M Ford Graydorian – The Writing Bureau 16 Log into www.cr5.co.uk your local community website!
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