Tag: family

No more – please!

I would not ban Christmas. I think it was one of Oliver Cromwell’s biggest mistakes[1]. He may not have been the author of the legal ban but upholding it was a mistake (from 1644 to 1660).

But and there’s a but. Here the sun is shining and the temperature is mild. There are still bees landing on the flowers in my garden. Wander into a British supermarket or garden centre on the first of October and guess what I find. Rows and rows of Christmas goods. Anything from food in fancy tins to cheap toys from the far east. One or two shops take this to ridiculous extremes. Enter the front door and the first encounter is piles of Christmas goods. No possibility of ignoring the day that’s nearly 3-months away.

I find it insulting. It’s like we (shopkeepers) must shift this stuff, so we are going to make you pay attention. Make you loop your way through brightly coloured isles. For parents it must be awful.

The world turned upside down. Let’s bypass Halloween. Let’s bypass 5th November (Gunpower plot). Let’s bypass any other traditional winter festivals. Let’s go straight to Christmas.

I’m not alone. One local garden centre is especially bad. With the idea of continuing my efforts to eke out the last Autumnal colours and buy some compost, I walked through the doors. As I weaved may way through cavalcades of shiny lights and stuffed Farther Christmases my heart sank. Totally unimpressed with the tinsel and plastic trees. Popping out the other side, into the part of the garden centre that is a garden centre, I sighed. Others around me sighed too.

“I didn’t come here for that” and we agreed. It was too much. I wouldn’t have said the same in mid-November but, so early in the season, I was in no mood for tacky festive celebrations.

Should I lobby my Member of Parliament to ban the display of Christmas goods in the shops more than a month before the day of celebration? It’s worth thinking about. Today, I can’t say we have a puritan-dominated Parliament so there’d be little risk of igniting a religious conflict. That said, I imagine most parliamentarians have bigger fish to fry just now.

Let’s not ban Christmas but a modicum of common sense from the commercial sector wouldn’t go amiss. Ramming Christmas goods down our throats is bad practice. I know that the takings for a lot of commercial businesses go up in the festive season.

My question is – are shops there to serve customers or is it the other way around. We all like celebrations. A saturation of homogonous red and white for weeks and weeks is not celebration. It’s jolly depressing.

Shopkeepers may say – you have a choice. Don’t go in our shops if that’s your reaction. That’s a viewpoint that could drive a call to outlaw the unloading of artificial jollity on an unsuspecting public. Forcing us to grind our way through layers of stuff destined for landfills in January next.

Oliver Cromwell’s era came to an end as foolishness took over. 365 years later I think we can do without 365 days of Christmas. British winter festivities amount to more than colourful biscuits.

[1] https://cromwellmuseum.org/did-oliver-cromwell-ban-christmas/

Generational Differences

I believe the Scottish word for it is – Dreich. With that spelling it almost sounds German. I’d pronounce it as dreek. What this means is the weather is dull, damp, gloomy, and miserable. Overcast, wintery, with intermittent drizzle and rain never seeming to give up. Couldn’t be a better word to describe it – Dreich.

That was yesterday. There’s a good chance that today will be the same. Not unusual for February. That said, the cumulative impact is that the ground water is rising and the rivers are topped right up to the brim. That rock hard, dusty, tinder dry summer of last year is as if it was a million years ago. What water shortage?

Outside the bird life is flourishing in these damp conditions. I saw a large white Egret was doing a morning stroll oblivious to the drizzle. Up top a tall dead tree a Cormorant was surveying its territory. Ducks are playfully buzzing around the river’s edge. The Canadian Geese are doing what they do every day. Foraging for anything of interest.

It does not good to complain about this uninspiring weather. Although it’s a cultural phenomenon, the weather is the biggest sources of small talk in this country. “You’re not made of sugar, get out there and do something”. I maybe miss remembering these parental words. It’s clear that mulling around indoors and constantly whining isn’t a good formula for mental health.

Add to the gloom and despondency the daily dose of British politics. So many of us had hoped that replacing one group of deafening incompetent politicians with a duller set would mean that stuff gets done. The boring, but necessary, tasks of governing would be accomplished without endless calamities. Faint hope.

For lunch, to escape the incessant rain, I sat down in a coffee shop. The place was busy. Everyone coming in to get out of the rain. Shaking off umbrellas and drying out raincoats. I had to look around to find a comfortable place to sit. Near the entrance. Next to me were an older couple and their granddaughter. It’s impossible not to earwig in such situations. We exchanged a couple of polite smiles.

Here I recount what fascinated me about the generational gap. The young girl didn’t put her mobile phone down once, in so far as I could see. It was clear from the conversation that she was not allowed to use her mobile at school. Phones were confiscated. If my observation indicates anything, it’s that banning phones just mean more mobile phone use when the opportunity presents itself.

Politics reared its head in their conversation. The granddaughter was monosyllabic about the subject. Maybe it was one she studies at school. She carried on scrolling. Unsolicited grandfatherly advice came across the table. To paraphrase – You should watch that man Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News. He speaks very good English. He makes a lot of sense. The young girl carried on scrolling.

Oh brother! There’s a generational gap summary in a couple of rainy-day minutes.

I had one grandfather on my mum’s side. On my dad’s side my grandfather died relatively young. Both were West Country farmers. The grandfatherly advice I got was more to do with hard work. Not so much to do with politics. That is except for amusement about the hippies that turned up at the village of Pilton every year. That became the Glastonbury festival. Given that my grandfather had experience of the First World War, that must have been quite a contrast.