She'd have leapt at the chance of a washing machine. My own mother was one of the millions who were both time-poor and cash-poor. Nor, God forbid, am I suggesting a return to the life that working-class mothers endured in the days before the birth of the convenience culture. But it is when the benefit is trivial, or even non-existent, and the cost is real. It's not that convenience is, of itself, a bad thing. Little did she know that she had a legal right to it
My mother eventually got her washing machine but never grasped the concept of leisure. I vividly remember reading the Nine O'Clock news on telly that night with my right arm hidden under the desk. I turned on the gas to melt the stuff, stupidly shoved a match into the combustion chamber and an hour later I was in the local hospital getting treated for rather nasty burns to my hand and arm. My own career in DIY came to an explosive end 35 years ago when I was trying to fix a hole in a flat roof and hired a bitumen burner. DIY took off partly because people didn't want strangers in their homes doing jobs they could do for themselves. The supermarkets ran out of flour because we all started making our own bread.
People have found themselves with time on their hands, doing things they didn't do before. Most of us have found ourselves, whether we like it or not, living lives that are time-rich and money- poor. Covid has turned the message upside down. We have fallen for that message however ludicrous and even harmful to the planet it may be.īut something interesting has happened in the past ten months. In such a world, what is convenient must be desirable simply because it saves us time. Not to worry: just think of the pay packet! So the young father never gets home from work in time to bath his baby before bedtime. That's to say, we've focused on earning the dosh even if it consumes all our time. For decades, we have been living lives that came to be described as ‘money rich and time poor'. There's one big reason why this has come to be so. If you package something as ‘convenient', it's a sure sell. The marketing geniuses who tell us why we absolutely must have what we didn't even know we wanted conned us into believing that convenience trumps everything. I suspect the answer to my bewilderment lies in one of the most misused words in the English language.
Plastic pollution is doing massive harm to our precious planet - something that this newspaper was campaigning about long before David Attenborough shocked us all by showing a dying turtle struggling to escape from a plastic bag.
Maybe it's because they look clean, but I bet most people wash them anyway - even if they're about to boil them.Īs for the bags, surely we've all got the message about unnecessary plastic by now. I struggle to understand why anybody has ever needed a prepared carrot. John is about as likely to offer them to his loyal customers as I would be to buy them.Īs for cauliflowers, how can we be sure what they are if they don't come in a plastic pack with ‘cauliflower' printed on the label? You can buy just about anything in Shepherd's Bush market - from fresh fish to food for your goldfish and from showy dresses to suitcases to carry them home in.Īnything except, that is, prepared carrots. John has been working on the stall since he left school. They wanted to encourage the spread of local markets and they succeeded. John's father set up the stall after the War when the government was giving small grants to demobbed servicemen who were coming home to no jobs and no prospect of getting one. It's run by John, but his mother Sylvia still helps out even though she's well into her 80s. When I'd finished reading it, I got on my bike, cycled to my local market and stocked up with a week's fruit and veg from the same packed stall I've used for 40 years. The story appeared in a perfectly serious report on these pages about the problems the food industry is facing because of a combination of Covid and Brexit. It means that if we want to eat carrots in the foreseeable future we might very well have to scrub them in water to remove any dirt, or even peel them
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