Sunday Bloody Sunday and the Lost Art of Boredom
‘Sunday Bloody Sunday really encapsulates the frustration of a Sunday. You wake up in the morning, you’ve got to read all the Sunday papers, the kids are running round, you’ve got to mow the lawn, wash the car, and you think – Sunday Bloody Sunday!’
Alan Partridge’s characteristic misinterpretation of the U2 song inspired by the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry inadvertently highlights how the so-called ‘Day of Rest’ traditionally had a unique identity of its own, the genuine oddity in the seven-day calendar; but does it retain its uniqueness in an age when many shops are open all week round and a generation has come of age without an awareness or experience of what Sundays used to represent to the majority? Well, perhaps in our minds more than in reality.
It’s only natural that we associate certain days of the week with our first exposure to them; what’s interesting is how these initial associations can colour our view of them for good, and what they once represented proves to be surprisingly durable. Monday, for example, was always the day of dread that meant returning to the school grindstone, and Monday continues to be a day of dread for the following half-century after school where most are concerned; Friday was eagerly anticipated, the anti-Monday that heralded momentary freedom, and unlike its miserable mirror image at the other end of the week, one that still evokes transient euphoria for many. Saturday was arguably the best day of the week – Swap Shop/Tiswas/dragged around C&A and M&S by mum with the promise of a visit to the city centre toy-shop/football results/Doctor Who/Match of the Day etc. – and Saturday’s magic hasn’t waned. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that when it comes to Sunday, our image of it remains to an extent frozen in childhood amber, or at least when Sunday is imminent. More often than not, the prospect of it coming round tends to produce a weary sigh. In retrospect, that one more precious day free from school – something that should have made it as exciting as a Saturday to wake-up to – seemed to be shrouded in such an incurably drab torpor is curious; maybe Sunday was Saturday’s perennially poor relation because we knew we’d be back at school the following day, and so much of it seemed to be preparing us for that inevitability because it was so bizarrely boring.
Unless one were a farmer, clergyman, foreign language student or devotee of creaky monochrome movies about the war, television was usually best avoided; even that ordinarily reliable provider of entertainment appeared impotent on Sunday and was only generally switched-on in the middle of the afternoon so dad could watch ITV’s regional football show. The radio grabbed the spotlight from the telly as a consequence: Ed Stewpot and his set-in-stone set-list of prehistoric nursery ditties – ‘The Laughing Policeman’, ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’, ‘Nellie the Elephant’, ‘The Ugly Duckling’ et al – sound-tracked the Sunday morning experience for more than one generation; Jimmy Savile’s ‘Old Record Club’ enlivened the early afternoon with its top ten replays from the 60s, sparking nostalgia in parents and introducing kids to classics that contrasted with the more familiar contemporary chart sounds; and as for the top 40, that would dominate tea-time listening, even if the fact that the new chart had already been covered three days before on TOTP robbed it of any drama. Still, knowing which position one’s favourite records were at made recording them onto audiotape easier (a practice that may have ‘killed music’, but came in handy when pocket-money only stretched to one single from Woolie’s per fortnight).
But such aural distractions couldn’t wrench Sunday away from the strangely soporific rituals that really made it so distinctive from every other day. This usually began with a couple of newspapers popping through the letterbox – thicker and more expensive than the weekday dailies; many households had a healthy schizophrenia when it came to Sunday reading habits. One paper would usually be the trashy titillation of the News of the World/Sunday Mirror/Sunday People brand, the kind I remember being full of call-girl confessions, Rod Stewart’s latest blonde and Princess Margaret’s latest beau; the other would tend to be the more sombre Sunday Times/Observer type, with one balancing out the other and establishing an odd equilibrium as mum and dad chose their weapons whilst defiantly remaining in bed. Of course, for those raised in a religious household, the church still played a major part in the Sunday routine – either the morning service, evensong, or the insidious institution of Sunday School, seemingly established so that mum and dad could engineer the arrival of a little brother or sister.
As far as secular upbringings went, however, Sunday was a day in which the whole family realised the advantages of spending the rest of the week leading their own lives; everyone appeared to resent the presence of everyone else. In the case of mum and dad, both eagerly embraced their designated roles; for him, this meant washing the car or attending to DIY; for her, this meant ironing or sticking a roast in the oven, where it would cook on a low light for what seemed like about six months, its aroma sweeping through the house with the creeping stealth of mustard gas and seeping into the bricks and mortar like Oxo-flavoured napalm. Occasionally, there would be variations to the routine, but even these couldn’t provoke any emotion other than shoulder-shrugging resignation. Most of these centred around a ‘ride out’ in the car, a depressing excursion through a desolate landscape that bordered on post-apocalyptic, a journey that either led to a local beauty spot rendered ugly by rotten weather, a minor stately home, the stultifying tedium of the garden centre – and the fact that this emporium of inertia was the only shop open for business somehow intensified Sunday’s terminal dullness – or grandma’s house, where sometimes cousins would call and there would at least be an opportunity to indulge in much-needed play.
Play! Ah, yes – the one saving grace of Sunday. The generations starved of mass-marketed virtual-stimulation turned to their imaginations and transformed their uninspiring surroundings with little in the way of corporate assistance. At the time when ‘The Professionals’ was every kid’s favourite programme aimed at grownups, my brother and me would sometimes recreate CI5 with our cousin Robin, though we all wanted to play Bodie. Therefore, we invented our own spinoff titled ‘The Three Bodie’s’. Lewis Collins in triplicate! You’d need CGI for that these days. Such activities could alleviate boredom until boredom intervened again via a bath and supper in the company of Esther Rantzen and Doc Cox. With school to look forward to in the morning, Sunday had felt like a lacklustre prologue to the resumption of the norm, a bridge between the compassionate leave of Saturday and the re-imprisonment of Monday.
It’s cruelly ironic that John Major, a man who romanticised the mythical Albion image of a Sunday, was the Prime Minister who delivered the killer blow to it. The passing of the Sunday Trading law in 1994 enabled high-street chain-stores to open their doors and facilitated the rise of out-of-town retail parks, finally making Sundays resemble every other day, at least in terms of the consumer society. There isn’t time for boredom on a Sunday anymore, and whilst many would regard that as cause for celebration, others might argue that the loss of the archaic eccentricities that once made Sunday such a unique day are worthy of mourning – even if they were bloody boring.
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August 31, 2014 at 9:17 am -
Two Way family Favourites too, always the Nat King Cole & Glenn Miller classics.
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August 31, 2014 at 9:23 am -
I used to enjoy Sundays: boiled egg for breakfast, Church, Sunday School, Roast with the family (the only day we all ate together) and then visit my granny (in one of those semi well-to-do Greater London suburbs now resembling Islamabad.
We rested, it may have been boring but I don’t recall it that way. Would be nice to have it that way again, a real day of ‘rest’.
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September 1, 2014 at 4:52 am -
XX Would be nice to have it that way again, a real day of ‘rest’.XX
So. REST, if that’s what you want, or is someone shoving a shotgun up your arse and FORCING you into Tescos?
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September 2, 2014 at 12:15 am -
Presume this is meant as ironic or are you totally missing the point? That said, they’d need to force me into Tesco any day of the week.
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August 31, 2014 at 10:01 am -
Sundays…. dominated by ‘Sunday Dinner’ in our house, always served at ‘dinner time’ (roughly 1pm). Spend the morning with my (maternal) grandparents who lived just up the road, every few weeks in the afternoon (when my Dad had a full day off, being a copper) we’d make the trip to the other side of town, and a few hours at my other Grandparents – which I loved, primarily ‘cos my Uncle Rob was only 4 years older than me, and ergo more like a brother or a mate, and he had records & tapes, and ‘other’ toy cars. The journey home would invariably be a ‘black’ one though, with my old man seething about something his parents did or said, or something one of his many sisters had done. Oh the joy of ‘big families’ (especially ones that are clambering over one another to ‘ship west’ out of “Europe’s Biggest Council Estate ”). Probably the reason I always remember Sunday Evening TV (Songs Of Praise, The Onedin Line) as such a dark affair. There was a time at around 6 or 7 yrs old when I had the ‘joy’ of those awful Sunday Morning quasi-religious programmes like ‘The Sunday Gang’ or that one with Dana made even more so by going to ‘Sunday School’ at the local Methodist Church – how I resented having a ‘day off’ ruined by being shackled in another kind of classroom dressed up in irksome patent Sunday Best. Happy Clappy is something I could never get down with, even at that age – and the ‘do-gooders’ that ran it freaked me out a bit too, two porky sisters & a brother who clearly had nothing better to do than sing songs about ‘a very little man’ called ‘Zacchaeus’. *Shudder*
From early 1981 (7 years old) Sunday teatime would be dominated by the Radio One Top Forty show in glorious ‘Stereo VHF’ – I knew nowt of ‘Bullseye’ for that reason. Once I was old enough to do a paper round, I adopted an even more glorious routine – one that I liked so much I carried it on well after I got ‘other jobs’ – by 1988/89, it was a case of up at 5.40am, “marking up” and about 4 rounds (including a ‘hot breakdcakes’ break from the bakery up t’road), home about 9.30, snoozing, then around the same time dinner was ready it was time for Pick Of The Pops with Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman on “1 FM” for two hours, followed by maybe a bike ride before it was time to switch the radio back on for the new Top Forty. TDK-tastic Sundays, not ‘arf!
I then gave that routine up as the lure of ‘double time’ at the new local ‘big supermarket’ was too much to resist, especially given I was outside on the old trolleydash – so I must confess to having conspired with Johnny Major & co in rubbishing God’s ‘Day of Rest’!
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August 31, 2014 at 5:20 pm -
” ‘a very little man’ called ‘Zacchaeus’”
You complete and utter BASTARD! I have spent nearly 40 years trying to get ‘he climbed up into a sycamore tree for the Saviour for to see, to see’ and ‘When the road is rough and steep, fix your eyes upon Jesus’ out of my bloody head! I shall now have to hum that Ebay song from Weird Al all evening to counter act it.
I was the fat kid in shorts and kipper tie in your Sunday school.
“The Lord told Noah to build him an archy archy, build it outta gopher barky barky, Children of the Lord. SO rise, shine …”
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August 31, 2014 at 10:32 am -
Thank you Anna – very evocative.
These days my memory fades more with each passing day but I remember childhood Sundays with astonishing clarity. Breakfast was either cornflakes or porridge followed by a small fry-up. Then help mum with the washing up/cleaning/laundry. Dad went ‘down the allotment’ (we didn’t have a garden, just a backyard) and my brother and I off to Sunday school. Cycle over the railway bridge to Grandma’s to collect Granddads dinner in a big basin; to be delivered to the riverside boatyard where he worked as a weekend watchman. Always got sixpence and a Chelsea Bun he’d bought on Saturday for my trouble.
Back home for dinner and listen to ‘Educating Archie’/’The Clitheroe Kid’/’The Navy Lark’/ ‘Billy Cotton Band Show’/’Jack Jackson’ or whatever. Then for me it was off to choir practice (I was eventually thrown out of the choir for playing jazz on the harmonium).Some years ago I drove to the area to find that all the streets had gone. Replaced with old folks bungalows, and lots of shops selling sarees, gold jewellery and sticky sweet eastern sweeties (now known as ‘The Golden Mile’). Couldn’t get in the local Library, it was a female-only day. The Church was still there but unoccupied and virtually derelict.
I haven’t been back.Maybe because each Sunday was virtually identical it became embossed in the brain. Still treasure the memories though and I’m still a huge fan of the music of that time.
Sniff – wipes a tear – I’ll skip the pork scratchings this week, got any Ovaltine or Bovril?
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September 1, 2014 at 3:43 am -
Ooops – sorry pardon your madamship – I meant thank you Petunia of course.
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August 31, 2014 at 11:08 am -
Very evocative. I do remember sunday in the 70s being primarily about boredom. One random memory that comes to mind was church. We went every sunday. Mostly it was sunday school (boooooring!) but once I was invited to present a bible reading to the grownups in the church proper. So, I’d been to elocution lessons due to having had a spate of abscesses in my mouth that had had me talking oddly, so I’d got this whole thing about doing a bit of proper presentation and drama in my reading going. So there I was, enunciating away like Larry Olivier meets Donald Sinden, gesturing expansively and going the full monty, and I lost my place. The congregation suddenly looked huge like it was the Albert Hall, and they were all staring at me. I looked down and the words in the Bible had suddenly swum into an unintelligible swirling goop. I fled the lectern.
Sorry, there is no punch line. There was an awkward silence, then the vicar (who was a temporary supply vicar) went on with We will all now sing hymn 53. I’ve never forgotten it though.
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August 31, 2014 at 11:39 am -
Evocative is indeed the word. I never did enjoy the boredom or the dreary Songs of Praise. Sunday afternoons always had some camp secret agent type thing. There was the one about the agents with special powers – I can’t remember the name though now. Department S, and of course, Peter Wingard (aka Petunia Winegum) as Jason King. I have fond and distant memories of Sunday night tv, particularly of that tremendous bodice ripper with cardboard sets, Poldark. What was the period one before that which became a national instiution with Soames as the lead character? A tradition carried on with the hilarious Dallas wannabe, Howard’s Way.
But all in all I prefer my Sundays with coffee shops such as I am sitting in now, and open cafes-
August 31, 2014 at 12:01 pm -
I remember now. It was the Forsyte Saga.
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September 1, 2014 at 4:03 am -
I was featured in Song of Praise with Geoffrey Wheeler at my school during the 60’s. Many letters of appreciation were received, mostly from retired Indian colonels, I think.
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August 31, 2014 at 11:57 am -
Hudson’s newsagents pictured was in Seacroft Leeds, one of the more salubrious parts of the city the other side of the road from where I used to work at the Elida Gibbs factory (now part of the Unilever megalopoly), but still giving employment to the local ladies (line girls we used to call them), who despite only attending school until 15 could still give you a verbal tongue lashing as a young graduate trainee from the ‘posh’ side of the City.
Sunday’s before the change to the Sunday trading act were a mind-numbing dull ache, all the shops were closed apart from Mr. Chakrabarty who sold overpriced cans of peas, but also rented under-the-counter pornographic videos to his more familiar regulars. His bottle of Bulmers cider was the highest ratio of alcohol to pennies available and it was common-place to find the bored youths of the getting utterly lashed down the ginnel by the shops.
A retired British Army officer in a French work of fiction from the 1950s once said: “If England has not been invaded since 1066, it is because foreigners dread having to spend a Sunday there.” – This was certainly true of the post-industrial North in the time between the closing of the factories and the opening of Harvey Nicks.
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August 31, 2014 at 12:16 pm -
Looking back nearly 70 years I can recall the stultifying tedium and ennui of a Sunday. Church, Sunday school and church again for evensong. The memories are all monochrome.
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August 31, 2014 at 12:43 pm -
A classic Handcock had it about right.
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August 31, 2014 at 12:54 pm -
I had forgotten the endless war films. Usually “Sink the Bismark”. A fine piece of writing, by the way
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August 31, 2014 at 1:11 pm -
I just recalled that I had a “Bodie” poster. Lewis Collins was the man. I’m not sure his career went to well after that, and I was sad when he passed away
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August 31, 2014 at 1:19 pm -
Come to rural Suffolk on a Sunday afternoon for a walk back in time. Try Bungay, for example. Also, half day closing lives on, much to the bewilderment of those who come from other parts.
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August 31, 2014 at 5:23 pm -
Rural North Norfuck has it’s moments too. I’m writing this whilst watching various touristy families to our National Trust historic Market Place wander around said historic market place looking for an open Cafe. Yeah it’s sad of me but this is Sunday in Norfolk and I’ll take the schadenfreude where I can get it.
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August 31, 2014 at 1:23 pm -
It rather seems as if, like Boris Johnson, you’re in favour of both having your cake (memories of boring byegone Sundays) and eating it (the convenience and lack of boredom of today’s Sundays).
For what it’s worth, I fully agree. My zenith (nadir?) of Sunday childhood boredom was “going for a drive in the country”. This was a compulsory family treat. We always seemed to end up at distant St. Andrews, where to walk along the west beach at low tide was, in those days, the personification of “going through the motions”.
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August 31, 2014 at 3:18 pm -
In English Journey (1933) author J.B. Priestley writes amusingly about the utter boredom of a wet Sunday in Bradford and though I don’t have any quotations handy, I do remember a loving description of a miserable Sunday “tea” consisting of a plate of cold ox tongue, lettuce, and a slice of canned beetroot, that I am sure will bring tears of nostalgia to the eyes of many readers here.
Of course the original idea was that if all the businesses and places of entertainment were closed on Sundays, workers would have nothing to do other than go to church. The idea survives in somewhat vestigial form to this day here in Florida where in certain counties you cannot buy alcohol on Sunday, starting at midnight Saturday, in the supermarket, or in other counties or cities where you cannot buy alcohol before midday on Sunday.
Bizarre as these laws seem in the modern world, often they have a hidden purpose, such as discouraging the construction of new restaurants or hotels within certain boundaries, and thus possibly protecting existing local businesses from competition. There is nearly always more than meets the eye.
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August 31, 2014 at 3:24 pm -
We were a family of walkers, long treks around the local countryside then back home to listen to some radio programme about the latest films, playing with my meccano, late dinner then radio Luxemburg,we never had a TV; now it’s trek round the shops, back home to watch endless come dine with me and late dinner, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
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September 1, 2014 at 3:32 am -
Ah Meccano!
After you’d spent hours building that enormous crane (with the built-in electric motor) and the exquisite agony of pins and needles as you tried to stand up and discovered that your legs had gone and died without telling you.
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August 31, 2014 at 5:57 pm -
1960s on the Isle of Wight, was 1950s for you lot; we know this from our cousins from Slough, who visited us to tell us how quaint and backward we yokels were.
It’s true that Sundays were dominated by family, and I wonder if the phenomena of youthful Marxism was spawned by the dreary familiar? But if you live in the countryside, and you are not too much the urban sophisticate, the countryside would always be there for you as an escape hatch; which may account for why parochial types tend to be less Marxist, if at all. It may also account for the slew of young Marxists that turn into extreme conservative types in their middle age, for what bored these urban sophisticates into that youthful distraction, was the very thing they needed for their own emotional stability, the family.
Great bit of writing Petunia.
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August 31, 2014 at 6:23 pm -
First off, thanks for calling it what it was – a “massacre” in Derry, Petunia. Noted. With appreciation.
What a lot of people on both sides of the divide in NI have forgotten is that the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-60s actually started because a visiting English lecturer to Queens University Belfast discovered that on a Sunday even the swings in the local Council playground were tied up, so he couldn’t take his kids out for a romp.
There were Sundays and there were Ulster Sundays
I am just about old enough to remember the informal rule that all pubs should close on a Sunday. Of course, it all depended where you were how seriously this was enforced. While I grew up, this led to the notorious “Presbyterian lock-ins” where the mainly Catholic publicans would sign in the local Protestants as ” temporary members of the Gaelic Athletics Association” so they could get a pint or two after prayers …
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September 1, 2014 at 3:15 pm -
Fantastic! It sounds like Lake Wobegon. “We went in for sitting, all nineteen of us, in Uncle Al’s and Aunt Flo’s living room on Sunday morning and having a plain meeting and singing hymns in our poor thin voices while not far away the Catholics were whooping it up.”
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August 31, 2014 at 8:09 pm -
I turned 2 years old in July 1963, a month before The Beatles released She Loves You in August. I gather that I embarrassed my parents at church one Sunday morning, presumably once the ditty had reached Number 1 in either September or regained the top spot at the end of November, by singing out “Yeah, yeah, yeah, YEAH!” at the end of a hymn. I apparently believed all popular songs finished that way.
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August 31, 2014 at 8:48 pm -
I don’t know whether any else here was ever a member of that wonderful organisation “The Sealed Knot”. In the seventies one could go away for the weekend (Sundays included), meet new friends and hit them with a pointed stick. Beer played a major part in it all. It still goes on but health and safety has spoilt a lot of the fun.
Ten years previously, Sundays, after Church, meant “Round The Horne”, “Navy Lark” and “The Clitheroe Kid”. I still find them funny (even Jimmy Clitheroe). And I didn’t have a clue what Julian and Sandy were on about.-
August 31, 2014 at 9:05 pm -
“And I didn’t have a clue what Julian and Sandy were on about.”
Yep, the days when ‘troll’ didn’t mean some kid behind a keyboard with a serious ritalin addiction.“As feely ommes…we would zhoosh our riah, powder our eeks, climb into our bona new drag, don our batts and troll off to some bona bijou bar. In the bar we would stand around with our sisters, vada the bona cartes on the butch omme ajax who, if we fluttered our ogle riahs at him sweetly, might just troll over to offer a light for the unlit vogue clenched between our teeth”-taken from Parallel Lives, the memoirs of renowned gay journalist Peter Burton
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August 31, 2014 at 10:22 pm -
Damn right. Nice to vada your dolly old eek & ooh, look at the thews on ‘im & the rest of it.
There are some very privileged posters here.
Being (then) a gas only household in what is now referred to as the property ‘polygon of doom’ by some, it was quite a while before tv was available. Meanwhile we took the accumulator to Mr Eggleton in Northumberland Avenue for a recharge for for the LT side of the radio, & the 120v HT battery went into the post roast oven to try to get a bit more out of it.
Happy days.-
September 1, 2014 at 3:41 am -
I remember in the early 50’s when my dear old granny had ‘electric’ installed in her house (“is it mains or battery?”). She insisted that every socket must have something plugged in to it to stop the sparks from leaking out.
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August 31, 2014 at 11:52 pm -
You must have lived a long way from the transmitter, we listened to Children’s Favourites on a Saturday!
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September 1, 2014 at 10:55 am -
Sunday was a different day. Key words, Sunday dinner, Sunday school, Sunday observances, Sunday spins, as dad used to call them. Pickmere, Frodsham, Chester Walls or zoo. Even a bold trip to Blackpool…that was open! Sunday paper round collection ceremony. Lugging round the Sunday papers early in the morning. Definately, later, no church going and Sunday school faded as the car took over. Sunday has changed throughout my life. Now no different than any other day really. No specialness about it, like there used to be. Two most annoying things. Garden Centres close at 4pm or near and antique fairs have been busted by the internet on which we are all hooked. Garden centres and fairs are rather innocent pastimes but the internet has a very dark side…so sad really.
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