Dear LPG Readers,

Do you remember when the weekly family gathering would happen every Sunday?  Once upon a time, families lived so much closer together, and there was nothing else to do on that once extraordinary day of the week.   We, families, would get together more often, and while the younger members would feel somewhat inconvenienced by the fact that so little was going on during that one day a week, the ones that had been out on Saturday night had a day to recover properly.

The rest of us did very little apart from coming together at one family member's house for dinner, a catch-up, and the odd family spat. Many went off to church because the only shops that would be open were likely to be the corner shop where, if you were the family dinner’s host who had forgotten to buy something vitally needed to complete the menu, you could get an emergency supply.

I recently discovered that we officially lost our lazy Sundays 30 years ago this month. While a generation or two now has no recollection of that day of enforced slowing down, we oldies remember it well.   

Now, so many of those school-aged younger grandchildren are at football or some other extracurricular educational or sport-based pursuit. At the same time, to my surprise, I was recently notified of a Sunday morning hospital outpatient appointment.  The shops are as busy on Sundays as they are on Saturdays. Face-time, Skype, or Zoom has all but superseded the weekly Sunday family get-together, resulting in one less opportunity for more regular help when resolving (or exacerbating) those relational disputes that only other family members can help us make sense of.  

I remember opinions surrounding our Sundays being very split at the time. The government and big business would be able to produce 14.29% more revenue and profit than ever. Many men in the street could see an extra day when they could get to the bank or the shops, making life so much easier. At the same time, the other school of thought was hesitant to lose a day when there was no point in rushing around. While many people work regardless of the day of the week (hospital and transport workers, for instance), Sunday was the slow-down day when so many more workers could rest assured that their time off would coincide with that of their family and friends.

The irony is that for all that extra time we now have, there is still never any time to get things done, and the people around me appear even more stressed about the things that they don’t have the time to do.

Perhaps it is a case of the more time we have, the harder it is to fit life in…

JB, Dartford.

LPG found a song that might jog a memory or two…  

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…and LPG adds some information on the history of this subject…

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