Part 1 was published here yesterday.
All this though, shows the changing nature of our communities and I suppose the whole country, which these days often feels almost alien. I wonder what, for example, people born just prior to the First World War would make of it. ‘It’s a whole new world now,’ as mother used to say. Maybe it’s the routine that has gone. As much as we decry routine its part of the glue that holds us together, part of what make home feel like home.
Forty years ago, there was a rhythm, a routine that gave some order to your daily life, things that we took for granted and really didn’t notice until they were gone. The milkman for instance, as regular as an alarm clock where we used to live, the clanking of the milk bottles and the faint noise of the milk float’s electric motor as the milkman made his way from door to door, one of the sounds that were, well, just home. By seven o’clock the paperboy would have delivered the daily paper closely followed by the postman; most people had some sort of breakfast before leaving for school or work – often by bus after a walk to the bus stop and a call at the local corner shop for a packet of cigarettes, or for the kids a packet of sweets or a comic or, as you got older, a copy of the New Musical Express to be read on the top deck or rear seats of the bus.
What did all that routine provide? Well, social interaction and conversations with others of your own age or other adults, ‘good morning’, ‘nice day’, chat about this and that, the British obsession with the weather, a shared joke or a bit of gossip, all things which were part of the daily routine and not much missed until you found yourself years later driving alone in your car, having got up late, gulped a cup of coffee and joined the daily formula one race along roads five days a week, while listening to some radio station or, God forbid, the Today programme, the only interface with other drivers obtained when letting somebody out of a side road, or furiously shouted obscenities at some idiot who gets too close or cuts in at the next exit on the motorway.
Not much chance for conversation of anything really and for children being carted to school in mum or dad’s car even less. We’ve all seen Dyson and Hannah strapped in their booster seats in the back of a car, speaker buds in ears, transfixed by I-phones, I-pads, or the latest PlayStation gizmo. Lucky are the kids who travel by the school bus, but have you noticed bus and train passengers these days, few smiles and fewer conversations, except of course those already mentioned and the same fixation with either laptops or mostly inane loud conversations on mobile phones.
There was much more to this routine lark of course, boring as it sometimes felt, readers of a certain age may well remember T.V advertising on Boxing Day (never before) when SunSpot Holidays advertising began along with New Year Sales at major stores. People camping out for days before New Year’s Day to secure a three piece suit for £5 or something at a well-known major store and reported on T.V and in local papers, part of the New Year routine with both things eagerly awaited and reminded you that spring and Easter were on the way.
No Easter eggs before Valentine’s Day though and so the routine went on, The Boat Race, the Grand National, Whitsuntide when the holiday was, in fact, at Whitsun. Summer holidays mostly taken after the end of the summer term with no need for special permission from the school head teacher, Last Night of the Proms, Harvest Festival collections followed by Bonfire Night, Halloween? not really heard of then, never mind celebrated, if that’s the correct word, Poppy Day and finally Christmas, which started in most shops (when did they all become stores?) the last week in November and finished on Twelfth Night, when as part of the routine, all the decorations private and public came down.
The routine of country and a time long since gone, never to return, as illustrated by the scene this week in a local store of a Christmas Tree decorated with orange and black Halloween bric-a-brac which, I’d lay good odds on, was produced and imported from China.
Photo by David Guyler 
I enjoyed reading your two part article, Norman.
What is it all about? We are not luddites or adverse to change, overly. Perhaps it requires a careful analysis of that change.
One of the slurs used is ‘Oh you just want to put the clock back’. Not true! Psychiatrists and Sociologists may have the answers but the problem, and it is a problem, is beyond my simple processing. Just as a knee jerk comment I would say that everything is far more selfish now, but I know it is more than just that. There appears to have been a breakdown in Social Responsibility, something which has been identified before. Look it up on Wikipedia and it relates more to the commercial and environmental world rather than the ‘social’ world. Of course the clue is in the name not the morphing and corrupting of the real meaning by using associated and peripheral meanings.
Identity, belonging, ownership, responsibility; friends, home and family, these are not meaningless words; pronouns, alternatives, subsidiary or subordinate words, they are the real things. The real things that are important and an awful lot more important than money or the ‘tech’ or advertising, corporations, politicians and celebrity culture and a host of other shallow short term distractions.
The EU is a corporate entity it is not interested in village life the usefulness and purpose of small people, local communities. The small worlds of small people with small ambitions who don’t deserve to have a say in the EU’s Master Plan. The mighty steamroller crushes all before it, local security health service, postal service, police service, schools, jobs, sell them off and make money for the big boys.
Some have seen this before others have been told by their parents and many have read. We know this is nothing new our forebears fought and died to stop this happening and here we are with it happening again. The useful idiots stand by and talk of visa less travel and happy mixing of cultures but without looking past their noses to when those culture disappear and we are all grey and owned.
What you write about can be overlaid by the emerging and dangerous super power we rail against.
Ah, yes! For those who have heard about, or experienced, this way of life, are filled with a happy nostalgia! And why not? Can anyone with any sense at all not recognise that this was a sweet time?
Whether people have experienced it for themselves or been told about it by their parents or grandparents – surely there is some sort of race memory that recognises that THIS was precious and unsurpassed. A new security (bought by the blood of our forebears or relatives) and a promise of their future. There was a confidence borne of that. We have lost it because of a creeping, insidious ”divide and rule” attitude of the education system, brought about by our ”ruling class” – they are NOT ”elite”, they most definitely are NOT that. This is how they style themselves. We should not reinforce that term.
Children are not taught that there is a world out here that they should join, if they have narrow-minded remainer grandparents. (Because I have realised that it is either the very young – so-called students – or the late middle-aged who are mindless remainers.)
We leavers are either young with young families, or those who can remember those times described and realise what their grandchildren are missing.
But not only what they are missing, but what they might be involved in because of the EU’s aggressive military and expansionist and imperialist aspirations.
I want my children and grandchildren to remember how things were – and might be (in a limited way) again.
The EU: born from the ashes of the Third Reich. As our parents and grandparents fought on the battlefields or toiled for long hours in the munitions and equipment factories to secure our freedom from tyranny, we likewise need to keep (return) that freedom for our descendants.
Anyone who tries to prevent us from doing that is a traitor and should be dealt with accordingly. As with the Law, ignorance is no excuse.
And do we seriously imagine that the MPS who populate the HofC have the remotest chance of redressing his grievances?
Firstly the country has been scammed, cheated, lied to, deceived, conned and totally ignored by the entire mob of ‘political puppets’ ensconced in the HoC, for the simple reason that there was a total breach of contract on the day after the Referendum. The decision by the British people based on the clear promise in 2016 that, verbatim, This is your decision and ‘THE GOVERNMENT WILL IMPLEMENT WHAT YOU DECIDE’ – No ifs, buts, provisos or conditions! – And yet those morons in the HoC are still trying to illegally reverse this promise – THIS IS A TREASON WHICH WILL LIVE IN INFAMY. The only way this stupidity and treason will be settled will be by the people – IN THE STREETS!
“in the streets”. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Square Mile is regularly targeted by large numbers of Leavers acting innocuously (no placards etc.) and simply exercising their right to take public transport and then very long strolls around the City. thus clogging the area up. Mind you, the institutions would probably react to ongoing disruption by moving to Frankfurt, Paris etc. Tricky.