Related Articles
A quiet guerrilla war is being fought on my local high street that might be characterised as people versus modernity. Many of the shops have scrawled notices demanding cash as a payment, and still more put a minimum limit of £10 on card payments. Seeing as absolutely nothing in the town costs more than ten quid, including the houses, I assume this ensures an entirely cash economy.
But this is a battle the local retailers — and their loyal and chiefly centenarian customers — cannot win, because both banks have closed down and the cash machines they kindly left behind are often either broken or empty. We suspect they are left empty or unrepaired deliberately, so that they can eventually be ripped out as a consequence of lack of use.
I don’t know what the pensioners will do when that happens. They are already kind of deranged with fury, I think, to judge by the ferocity with which they drive their mobility scooters, heads down, growling, “Out the ’kin way”, and inevitably maiming the occasional toddler. What will happen is that the shopkeepers will be forced to take cards for all payments, thus reducing their incomes by up to 3 per cent at a time when many are already close to going bust. And somehow the old gadgies will be forced to come to terms with depersonalised new technology, or else starve to death.
No longer will the shopkeepers be able to look at me with disdain and say, “Only soft southern shite use credit cards”. In the long term it will mean the gradual further decay of the high street, with more shops closing down and thus less of a reason ever to go there. Right now we go there to buy our groceries — incredibly, we have a first-rate butcher and greengrocer — but also to be, you know, sociable. To catch up on gossip, to moan about the price of Werther’s Originals, the lack of longevity that attends to modern dentures and how phenomenally useless Rachel Reeves is. We won’t do any of that any more, then. Instead, we’ll undertake a round trip of 35 miles to the nearest decent-sized supermarket and talk to nobody while buying meat and veg of vastly inferior quality, flashing the silent checkout assistant a card proclaiming a loyalty that in truth we do not remotely harbour. A hatred card would be a more accurate option, so long as the money-off deals and points remained the same.
The Lloyds Banking Group is about to close 136 more branches up and down the country. About 6,000 have shut for good in the past ten years — the consequence, the banks say, of “changing consumer habits”. Changing consumer habits that they have urged upon people. At the same time, 115 post office branches are earmarked for closure, and last year 13,000 shops nationally shut their doors for good.
One in seven, meanwhile, remain empty — the figure in my neck of the woods, the northeast, is the highest in the country, at nearly 18 per cent. About 50 pubs call it time every month, the number increasing by the year. Your high street is in terminal decline. Mine clings on, just about, only because of the town’s remoteness, and does so by standing on the seashore, ordering back the tide.
Of course, high streets have been in decline for many years. It began when the planners thought it would be a great idea to build huge out-of-town centres of Mammon, overpriced trainers and crap food. I have read one or two books about the high street recently, and most conclude by saying, ‘Hey, times change, you don’t like it? Too bad, boomer.’ And perhaps that is right and one shouldn’t try to resist what seems to be the ineluctable march of commerce and capitalism.
But what we are giving up — besides a certain individuality of product and service, replaced by the homogeneous and the shrink-wrapped — is a sense of community. One by one the forums where we go to meet one another are disappearing: churches, pubs, the high street. And in general what we’ve dreamt up to replace them are the grim solipsistic silences of the gym and the disembodied solitary roaming of vast supermarket aisles. Perhaps we really do not like one another at all and would rather exist as singularities, wholly isolated from our fellow men and women. I think that is desperately sad and not terribly helpful if we are trying to build a nation that believes in shared values and empathy.
I’ll tell you a short story. Last year I was standing in our greengrocer’s at the back of the usual small queue of elderly people, the woman directly in front of me tiny, grey-haired and frail. The greengrocer noticed me and shouted down the queue. “Rod! I saw an article you had written in your newspaper. In it, you referred to a woman’s private parts as her ‘lady garden’. Well, I have to tell you, we don’t use that term around here,” she said sternly. “We prefer the word ‘minge’.” And the little old lady in front of me turned round and said: “She’s right, you know. Always minge.” That short interaction kept me laughing for weeks. I don’t want to give that up.
Trump’s war on diversity
Where anyone can land a job
I notice that the US Federal Aviation Administration has been pursuing a laudable diversity, equity and inclusion recruitment policy. According to its website, it had a specific number of something called targeted disabilities. “Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that the federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring, they include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”
That’s quite an ask, isn’t it? How much simpler it would be if they could find one candidate who embodied all of those qualities. A paralysed blind psychotic dwarf with no legs and the IQ of a packet of prawn cocktail Skips. And at the interview? “Why do you want to work as an air traffic controller?”
“Pardon?”
“Yay! He’s deaf as well! One hundred and eighty!”
Cycle of pain
The government is to introduce ten new laws to penalise “antisocial cycling”. These include fines for not using lights at night and not slowing down or stopping at school crossings and so on.
Sadly, not included in the new list of antisocial offences is “riding a bicycle while in possession of a fatuous self-righteous expression.” Nor indeed “riding a bicycle in a busy car lane when there is a totally empty cycle lane one metre to your left”.
Just wait until I’m secretary of state for transport, you Lycra-clad monsters. You think Pol Pot was bad?
Snail mail and a second-class slug
Residents in Storrington, West Sussex, are displeased that the Royal Mail has ripped out a 100-year-old postbox, leaving them without one. According to the Royal Mail, the problem was that the box was infested with “wildlife”. What fearsome creatures could it be? Tigers? Rats? No, it’s snails that Postman Pat and his friends are worried about.
Apparently these pulmonate gastropods enjoy feasting on the gum used to seal envelopes and so the postbox has to go. If I were a cynic I might venture that Royal Mail operatives had, in the small hours, been shoving snails into the pillar box to ensure they could close it down.
Source link
