Twenty Two Years on eBay

 

The first guitar I found on eBay... I just didn't buy it on eBay!

When does a phenomenon enter the realm of nostalgia? I’d say it happens the moment you realise it’s been a long time since you first encountered it and take a moment to look back on your first experience. That has just happened to me with eBay: I received an email from them this morning thanking me for being a customer for the past 22 years: I signed up on 26 April, 2002.

At the time I joined, eBay was a relative newcomer here in Britain. It all got started back in 1995 when a computer programmer named Pierre Omidyar set up the site AuctionWeb as a means of earning extra money. The first item sold was a broken laser pointer. After the company had become successful, a PR story went out claiming that the site had been set up in order to help Omidyar’s fiancée sell Pex candy dispensers, but this was a fabrication intended to create a warm, human interest vibe.

I’d heard about eBay from a couple of people. A friend told me that he and some colleagues had set up a syndicate to buy items and sell them on for profit. Apparently, you could find almost anything on there. My curiosity piqued, I decided to take a look. Ebay.co.uk had only been going for three years at this time. There was no Paypal: money changed hands usually in the form of cheques – a real sign of how far we've come since then. It wasn’t quite the Wild West, but most of the safeguards that are now in place to prevent fraud were not operative at this time. I wanted to test the service to see if it worked. I think my first, experimental purchase was a copy of an old Giles annual which cost only a few pounds. What with having to send off a cheque which the vendor then had to get cashed and cleared, it took something in the order of seven to ten days before the item showed up. But I’d proved a point. You could buy things on here without being ripped off. I next took a punt on a whole box of Giles annuals, listed as a job lot, thinking I could knock them out individually and turn a profit. As of a few weeks ago, they were still in my garage.

What I really wanted to know was whether I could use this new sales platform as a means to buy guitars. At around this time, I’d taken a chance and bought an electric guitar from a strange, British-based website called something like ‘Great Finds’ and based in East Anglia. The guitar didn’t cost very much, so it was a relatively low risk, and it turned up looking exactly as I’d expected. I now started to use eBay’s search facilities to hunt out guitars, but I was still a bit cautious of committing to a purchase. There was no means of getting your money back in the event of a scam. I found a guitar I was interested in, at what seemed like a reasonable price: £1400. It was still a lot more than I was prepared to risk in an online auction, but it ended with no bids. I then emailed the seller to ask if he was prepared to sell the guitar to me, privately, for the starting bid and he agreed. This was, then, technically the first guitar I’d found using eBay, though I’d broken the rules in asking the seller to deal with me offline. There were, however, no comebacks.

It took another two years before I finally bought a guitar by placing a bid on it. The start price was £240 and there were no other bidders. It was a 12-string Framus ‘Hootenanny’ guitar like the one formerly owned by John Lennon that has just come to light, but I wanted it for its association with The Kinks, who had used the same model on their 1965 single ‘See My Friends’. The guitar arrived with no problems: the seller even threw in a replacement set of strings.

Over the years, I have bought a total of 33 guitars on ebay, including a couple of instances like the first where the deal was done offline. It proved to be a good way of hunting out obscure models that were hard to find in dealers. In one instance, I had a particular model on watch which I let go without bidding. Fifteen years later, it ended up in my hands, identifiable from its highly figured wood grain.

It wasn’t all about guitars. I realised that eBay provided a chance to try and acquire some lost items from childhood – books and old toys. A favourite book of mine around the age of four was a ‘Little Golden’ book of Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon series Top Cat. I still owned my original copy but it had long since lost its covers and a couple of pages. There weren’t any examples to be found here in Britain, but I located one in America. I can’t remember what it cost including postage and customs duty, but it wasn’t very much. This was my first transatlantic purchase. Emboldened by the experience, I steeled myself to buy a guitar from across the pond.

I’d discovered a few American sellers who looked legitimate – all of them were bona fide dealers who had their own websites, and their photos were consistently shot against the same background (an easy way of spotting fraudulent listings is when the seller’s other items are shot against wildly divergent settings). One such dealer was based in Carbondale Illinois, and specialised in some of the wilder vintage models that interested me. The guitar I chose cost me £300 plus shipping plus tax, although these didn’t bump up the price by more than about £50. It took a week or so to arrive, but it turned up in February 2004. Later the same year, I bought two more guitars from the same seller.

In all those twenty two years, I’ve probably spent a fair few thousand pounds one way and another – I haven’t kept score, but it must be up around £10,000 by now, if not higher (one guitar alone cost £3,000). And out of all those items, there has been only one dud, a Dubreq Stylophone that was not as described. I’d like to report that the seller accepted it back with good grace but he proved to be a right handful. Pathetic as it sounds, he refused to accept the item off the postman when I returned it because it might give him Covid (this was March 2020). Somehow it all got resolved, but I ended up with a piece of useless junk which, like those Giles annuals, is still tucked away in the garage.

So much for buying, but what about the experience of selling? When I first signed up, I thought this might be a handy source of extra income (I was still freelancing at the time). The first guitar was intended to be a ‘sell on for profit’ item, likewise several others I’d acquired through other sources. Somehow, this never happened. When, many years later, I did set about selling stuff, it was a decidedly mixed experience. During a house move, I was trying to get rid of a fairly crappy electric piano that had once belonged to a relatively well known comedian (though not so well known that I can remember his name). I started it at a giveaway price but specified UK bidders only and, more to the point, collection only. The thing weighed a ton. It was won by a bidder from Italy. I cancelled his bid and offered it to the next one down the line, who fortunately was able to come and pick it up. But it all struck me as a lot of rigmarole just to end up with fifty quid. I had a similar experience trying to sell a Fender Twin Reverb amplifier. This is a substantial item, very heavy, and needs to be shipped in a flight case, which it didn’t have. Once again, the listing made it very clear that this was a collect only item. I lost count of the number of messages I had from people asking if I would ship it or if they could arrange a courier (impossible, with no shipping carton). I had better luck with some old copies of the TV and Radio Times, which were collected by a local buyer who happened to be an academic doing research into television and film. But on the whole, I decided that selling wasn’t for me.

In the course of writing this piece, I was curious to see how eBay would have appeared when I first signed in 22 years ago. The answer came courtesy of the Wayback Machine and the screenshot below (captured on 23 May, 2002) shows us the extent to which the online experience has evolved. Ebay in 2002 was a pretty primitive user interface, lacking design elements, and constructed from very basic coding. For all that, it still did what it set out to do and as can be seen from the links at the bottom of the page, had clearly defined rules designed to safeguard users: although before the era of Paypal, one simply had to take the risk when mailing cash or cheques to people you’d never met.

One may ask whether having eBay around has changed the way we do business. For many people, I’m sure it introduced and indeed normalised the idea of online sales and purchases, e-commerce being still a relatively new phenomenon when the platform emerged. For collectors, it opened up a worldwide marketplace: formerly rare items were suddenly much easier to obtain, and this will have had a corrseponding effect on values. ‘Real world’ retailers have had to play catch-up, especially in the field of books and comics where dealers who could once content themselves with working out of dusty old shops now must maintain an online presence if they want to do business.

A glance through Wikipedia’s summary of the company’s history reads not unlike a synopsis for a series of Succession: acquisition after acquisition (including the British Gumtree platform). Next year will mark the company’s thirtieth anniversary and I think it’s safe to say that eBay will continue to be with us for the forseeable and, indeed, the unforseeable future. And all because a computer programmer wanted to earn a bit of extra money...

The Haunted Highways

 

Before the internet, before Google, before Wikipedia, we used an earlier method of obtaining information on items of interest: ‘ask your dad’. Our dad would usually be able to provide an answer to anything we needed to know, and if he didn’t know himself, he probably knew which books to look in. At a very early age, I’d become curiously fascinated by street lamps and wondered why certain of them were orange whilst others gave off a greenish-white light. Our dad’s explanation, delivered from the driving seat of our Hillman Minx saloon, was that the orange lamps (such as the one outside our house) were ‘sodium discharge’ whilst the greenish type we passed on the way to our grandparents were ‘mercury vapour.’ It wasn’t necessary for me to understand those terms or the technicalities involved. I just needed to put names to them.

Whilst sodium lighting can still be seen in urban areas and even some motorways, it is gradually being phased out in favour of LCD lighting arrays, which give off a brighter, white light with a normal colour spectrum: sodium was well known for its monochromatic effect. Mercury vapour lamps, on the other hand, have disappeared completely, at least here in the UK. A Google image search reveals that these lights with their ghostly greenish hue are still in use in some parts of the USA, and probably elsewhere in the world. When first introduced in the early 1930s, mercury discharge lighting soon earned itself a morbid nickname: people referred to them as ‘cadaver lamps’ for the effect they had on the human complexion: the absence of red from the lamps’ spectrum lent faces the appearance of bloodless corpses. Any busy city street seen under mercury lighting would have given the appearance of a zombie apoaclypse in progress as all passers by had their complexions drained of colour. Various attempts were made to correct this, by coating the bulbs with flourescent powder, but these reduced the lamps’ efficiency, and on main roads at least, the old style ‘cadaver lamps’ persisted until the 1960s or even the early 70s.

Our street in Sutton Coldfield was lit by mercury lamps, which had been there since the 1950s. These were probably of the modified variety, as I don’t remember the ‘corpsing’ effect being noticeable. You can see the greenish glow around the lantern in the top picture which I took using a self-timer in the early 80s. As a contrast, the orange hue of the high pressure sodium lamps on the adjoining main road can be seen through the trees in the background.

Mercury streetlamps were already on the way out by the 1960s, with the adoption of the new, high-pressure sodium units on all major roads and motorways. I began to notice their disappearance in the 1970s, with the loss of that strange, haunted atmosphere that had pervaded Britain’s highways since the 1930s. The bottom image, sourced off Wikipedia, shows mercury lighting in use somewhere in the USA, and gives an accurate impression of how many of our major roads once looked after dark.

Today’s replacement units may give better light, but their installations lack the style and grace of earlier lighting columns, as functionality (and cost) wins out over form. And they don’t turn people into zombies either… which means that any you happen to encounter on the street will almost certainly be the real thing.

An Evening Spent in 1974

 

I’ve spent a lot of time in this blog trying to give an impression of how it felt to watch television in the 1960s and 70s. So when the BBC offers up a whole two hours of Saturday night viewing from fifty years ago, you can be sure I’ll be tuned in. Thus it was that, last night, I saw Abba win the Eurovision Song Contest, fifty years and one day on from the original broadcast.

My 1974 Letts’ Schoolboys’ Diary makes no mention of it, but I certainly sat and watched that evening’s broadcast live from the Dome in Brighton. Our television was still a black and white set, so this time around I had the added bonus of colour. Which, on the whole, didn’t add a great deal to the proceedings.

Compared to the garish spectacles we see today, the 1974 contest was comparatively austere in its staging, although it looked pretty swish to us at the time. The actual presentation, however, was mired in 1950s technology: the broadcast kicked off with a creaky rostrum camera montage of historic images of Brighton, with some perfunctory CSI captions overlaid. Across this we heard the voice of sports commentator David Vine giving us some historical and cultural context. Vine, unseen, would provide similar introductions to each of the acts, who had been pre-filmed on 16mm and caught on VT during rehearsals. Vine’s role would later, and more memorably, be filled by Terry Wogan.

The contest itself was presented by Katie Boyle, clocking up her third appearance as hostess of the event. With so much experience under her belt, one might have expected a slicker presentation, but she was quite hesitant and fumbling at times, as though overwhelmed by the knowledge that this live broadcast was being watched by a sizeable chunk of the planet. Even Koreans were tuned in, as David Vine assured us.

There was minimal ballyhoo: each act was briefly introduced by the aforementioned film clips, with a few of them making feeble attempts to look wacky. This year’s line-up included several groups, where former years had been dominated by solo performers or duos. Once the artistes had all performed their songs – accompanied, in most cases, by Ronnie Hazelhurst’s orchestra – the brief interregnum before the voting was filled, somewhat bizzarely, by a montage of songs by The Wombles. That’s a montage as in two songs. No Wombles band appeared: instead, viewers were shown a tatty looking 16mm film clip showing the costumed characters larking around in Brighton. At the end of this tawdry item, a sole costumed Womble wandered onto the stage with a placard urging viewers to vote for the Wombles. Was this really the best home-grown entertainment that Britain could offer up? Admittedly, the pop charts were a little odd during 1974, with Glam Rock not quite dead in the water, and nothing else ready to take its place. But really, the Wombles? If anything, this left me realising how much I hated the ‘band’, if you can dignify a bunch of session musicians in furry suits with such a title.

How about the songs themselves? On the whole, they were of a far superior standard to the formulaic computerised tosh that’s churned out today, although that’s not to say they weren’t without their own moments of cliché. Over the past couple of decades, the focus has shifted away from the craft of songwriting and onto performance, which has entirely defeated the original objective of the contest. Back in 1974, songwriting was still the order of the day, and while there were a few risible outfits on display (Yugoslavia’s ‘Korni Grupa’ in shiny coloured trousers), the emphasis was on putting across the song. The Netherlands’ act included a couple of puppet characters in a kind of musical box, which certainly set them apart, but on the whole, the artistes’ appearance hardly screamed out 1970s. Abba, of course, had their platform boots and glittery costumes which were about two years out of date over here, and visually stood out amongst a rather lacklustre bunch. Wooden spoon for the least sartorial effort went to Israel’s ‘Poogy’ group, who appeared in sleeveless charity shop style pullovers. Their song, a dismal piece of watered-down folk-rock was also instantly forgettable.

Ah yes, the songs. That was the whole point, wasn’t it. On the whole, there was nothing particularly offensive on offer, aside from a tendency towards the clichéd ‘oompah’ stylings that had come to dominate Euro pop since Sandie Shaw’s ‘Puppet on a String’. Britain’s entry was no exception. ‘Long Live Love’ even appropriated the title of a completely different Sandie Shaw hit, but wedded it to a dreary plodder with an inevitable ‘oompah’ chorus. Olivia Newton John did the honours, managing a surprising fourth place with this lacklustre effort. And what of our fellow nations?

Finland’s Carita performed ‘Keep Me Warm’ in English, an ambitious song, over orchestrated, that might have been a demo for a Bond movie. Spain offered a flamenco-style song, performed by a kind of Tom Adams lookalike, sounding like the soundtrack to a Costa Brava package tour. Norway’s effort sounded suspiciously like Stevie Wonder’s ‘For Once in My Life’, and was again delivered in English. Greece gave us a ‘la-la-la’ intro, one of several this evening, and a bouzouki player straight from the nearest cheese shop. The song was generic and bland. Israel’s Poogy had the aforementioned pullovers and a British Baldwin 12-string guitar. There were five vocalists, none of whom appeared to be more important than the others. Unlike almost every other entrant, they performed without the orchestral assistance of Mr. Hazelhurst et al.

Yugoslavia had a Matt Berry lookalike handling lead vocals at the head of a bunch who resembled Open University presenters. Theirs was definitely not a crowd pleaser, and stylistically all over the place, drawing one of the most muted responses of the evening from the audience.

As for Sweden, it’s hard to view Abba’s performance without the benefit of hindsight, but even ignoring what we now know, theirs was clearly the outstanding entry of the year. ‘Waterloo’ was a properly crafted pop song with hooks and a singalong melody that managed to avoid the cliché traps that caught out lesser performers. I remembered their conductor coming on dressed as Napoleon, a gimmick that was entirely unnecessary. Back in 1974, with no idea of who Abba might be, their entry stood out as one of the only memorable numbers in the whole contest, and on the night, I was unable to decide between this and the Netherlands’ entry ‘I See a Star’, which was memorable but fell into the ‘oompah chorus’ elephant trap.

For Luxembourg, former Joe Meek and Barry Gray collaborator Charles Blackwell conducted Anglo-German singer Ireen Sheer who delivered a semi-uptempo ballad with (sigh) yet another oompah chorus. Better dig that trap a bit deeper…

Monaco gave us an Englebert by numbers effort, delivered by a chap in a glittery jacket. A clichéd ballad with French lyrics. Belgium trotted out more of the same, an unmemorable ballad with pop overtones and a clumsy arrangement. Singer Jaques Hustin had the widest shirt collars of the evening. He was followed by the Netherlands’ effort ‘I See a Star’, delivered by ‘Mouth and MacNeal’, an established act who had scored minor hits in America. ‘Mouth’, a chunky beardy guy in sunglasses, tried a little too hard to be wacky, and there were of course, the aforementioned puppets. There’s no denying that this song was one of the major ‘earworms’ of the evening, possibly even outshining Abba in that respect, but the ‘oompah’ chorus probably counted against it. The contest was clearly a shoot-out between these guys and Abba as far as I could see, although it was ultimately Italy who came closest to unseating the Swedes. M&M came a creditable third, and the song gave them a hit in several European territories including Britain where it reached number eight in the charts. Even before last night’s repeat, I could still remember it after fifty years.

Ireland were not on great form: Tina Reynolds looked rather dowdy and old fashioned in spite of her daring ‘cross your heart’ outfit, styled to reflect the song’s title. The lyrics, however, were the worst of the evening, including the line ‘cross your heart and hope to die.’ Given the then current situation in Ireland, this was not, perhaps, the greatest sentiment to have put across.

Germany’s Cindy and Bert performed a drearily unimaginative ballad that sounded like two songs stuck together, and not very well at that. The judges evidently thought so too, with the song finishing in equal last place alongside Norway, Portugal and Switzerland. The Swiss also opted for a dull ballad, following the clichéd formula of minor key verse building to a big major key chorus, but the melody didn’t linger. Singer Piera Martell at least had a decent voice.

Portgual gave us an uptempo ballad in a kind of Julio Iglesias style, but the singer looked like he’d come to audit the books. This was the kind of song that Tom Jones would have rejected.

Finishing off the evening (there was no French entry this year), we had Italy, whose entry ‘Si’ came hotly tipped by David Vine, possibly on account of singer Gigliola Cinquetti being one of the most photogenic performers of the evening. The song itself, though popular with the judges, struck me as being over complicated, with too many changes of mood, and the singer’s voice struggled to cut through in some of the quieter passages.

And with that, we were done. Once the Wombles had embarrassed the entire British music industry, it was time for the voting. Technically, this was the least impressive part of the evening, with Katie Boyle looking nervous and making a few flubs as she attempted to make contact with the various juries. This entire section was marred by cross talk from another station, with a foreign announcer’s voice interjecting and making it hard to hear what Katie was saying. This was either a technical error on the night, or the surviving video tape has been compiled from two different sources.

Abba led from the start, and only Italy came close to knocking them off the top spot. There was an error at one point when the scoreboard showed Ireland with 20 points against Sweden’s 19, but someone had slotted in the wrong digit and their actual score was just 10. The board was of the most rudimentary design, with numbers clearly being pushed into the slots by hand, not unlike the kind of thing one might see at a cricket pitch. In the end, the top three places were taken by Abba, of course, Italy and The Netherlands.

On the night, I’m not sure if I was patriotically rooting for the UK, but I remember being sure that the two best efforts had come from Sweden and the Netherlands. The big question, in retrospect, is what might have become of Abba if they hadn’t won? A second place would almost certainly have guaranteed them a chart release in most of the participating countries, and the group had the songwriting talent to consolidate on this unexpected success. As a comparison, consider the Netherlands, whose entry did well on several European charts, following which no more was heard from them. Might this have been the fate of Abba in an alternate scenario?

It’s rare to see such a piece of archival television offered up wholesale as opposed to being reduced to a clipshow, and as an example of BBC television staging and technique, it makes for interesting viewing, whatever you might think of the contest itself. Obviously, it was chosen for repeat on account of Abba, but if the BBC still hold tape copies, I’d happily sit through a few more examples from the same era, in preference to the tat-fest we’ll be served up in a few weeks.

Oh… and I still can’t get ‘I See a Star’ out of my head… 

Easter Sunday in Old Money

 

‘It’s Sunday. I’ve had a rotten dinner. It’s raining. And I’ve got nothing to do.’ 

So said Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock in an episode of his radio series that acquired instant classic status when it was first broadcast in the late 1950s. The boredom of a typical British Sunday in the suburbs was something that everyone could relate to. Nowhere to go. Shops all shut. No television until 4pm when the Flowerpot Men came on. And you’ve seen all the films at the local cinema. No, there literally wasn’t anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon than try and spot faces in the wallpaper, or fill in all the ‘O’s and the ‘P’s and the ‘Q’s and the ‘D’s in the newspaper using a biro. Anyone under thirty reading this won’t have a clue what I’m on about. The clue is in the title of this blog itself.

‘Sunday in Old Money’ derives from a simple idea, that seemed to sum up what I’ve neen trying to capture in this series of conversational essays. Sunday, like nostalgia in the oft-quoted aphorism, isn’t what it was. This blog set out to give a first-hand account of how it felt to grow up in the 1960s and 70s, considering how the pop cultural and sociological landscape has changed in the past sixty years. In it, I’ve looked back at television, comics, toys, all manner of pop cultural icons and ideas, and tried to give an impression of how it felt to encounter them before they had acquired what one might term the patina of iconography. More to the point, the ways in which we, the audience, interacted with those phenomena were fundamentally different from how we do so today, and it is those differences that I’ve been trying to preserve in these posts.

But what of Sunday itself? As time draws on, there will be fewer and fewer of us left who can remember the sabbaths of old, those dreamlike empty days that came once every week. In the immortal words of Sid James: ‘there’s one a week, there always has been, and there’s nothing we can do about it.’ Sid, speaking in 1958 in that same edition of Hancock’s Half Hour, was wrong. There was something we could do about it: but it would take another thirty-five years for the change to come about.

Prior to 1994, Sunday as a socio-cultural phenomenon, was fundamentally unchanged in living memory. The aforementioned Hancock episode still felt entirely relevant when I first heard it sometime in the mid-1970s. Sunday had always felt a bit weird to me. Empty and strange. Everywhere closed, shop fronts shuttered, the roads and town centres quiet. I didn’t entirely like it, either. As a child, I favoured Saturday over Sunday if only because the shops were open which meant you were more likely to have a toy car bought for you (such was our dad’s generosity). You will gather from this that we were not religious in our household, despite our mum’s Catholic upbringing. My earliest recollections of Sundays in the mid sixties are characterised by teas with our grandparents – salads, tinned salmon, trifle and cakes of varying kinds (including the late, lamented ‘Kunzle Showboats’ – Google them for more on that story). Even the television was different. ITV came from a different operator, which meant different continuity announcers, and programmes you never saw on any other day of the week.

To find any shop open on a Sunday had a kind of unreal, miraculous quality. Despite the laws on Sunday trading, one or two outlets were permitted to open, including newsagents, essential for the supply of Sunday reading matter. But even this seemed a bit unusual. There was a newsagent-cum-post office a few minutes walk from where we lived in Lichfield, and this shop, uniquely, was open on Sundays (though not, of course, the post office counter). From here, sometime in 1966 or early 67, I remember getting a pack of Batman bubble gum cards. It felt pleasantly unusual to have anything like that bought for you on a Sunday. My first ever encounter with a shop that opened on a Sunday came even earlier than this, in maybe 1964 or 65, when our grandmother took me round to another newsagent, near their home, one Sunday afternoon, from where I was bought a small Matchbox model of a Bedford tipper truck. I still own it. This model always stood apart for me because it was the first time I’d been in a shop on a Sunday and had a toy bought for me. A small, indistinct line in the sand had been crossed.

Traders, of course, had been lobbying for a relaxation in the Sunday trading laws even then, but for the forseeable future, only a few outlets – including petrol stations and off-licenses – were legally permitted to open. A somewhat different situation held sway at the coast, where more shops seemed to be open on Sundays to cater to the tourist trade: yet even here, the majority of retail outlets remained closed.

This all changed in 1994, with the arrival of the Sunday Trading Act. Its terms allowed for large shops – ie. retailers with a ‘relevant floor area’ in excess of 280m² – to open for six hours on Sundays between the hours of 10am and 6pm. Smaller retailers were at liberty to set their own trading hours. Christmas Day and Easter Sunday were excluded as trading days. This situation prevails to the present time, with supermarkets typically opening at 9.30 or 10am and closing at 4pm, along with most high street outlets.

At first, it was hard to notice much of a difference. The supermarkets were the big deal as far as I was concerned, and it took a while for other retailers to follow their example, there being issues regarding staff working hours and union objections to be factored in. There was resistance from various quarters, notably the lobby group calling itself Keep Sunday Special, whose objections were wholly on religious grounds. That didn’t make any difference to me, but as time wore on, I began to miss those strange empty Sunday afternoons, when you could stroll around the town unencumbered by the world, his wife and kids. Car parks were empty, and for the most part, toll free. 

As with Sundays, so too with Bank Holidays. The typical Bank Holiday Monday used to feel like having two Sundays in the same week, but today, you’ll find an increasing number of retailers open for business.

On Easter Sunday this year, driving down through the town where I live, it felt odd to see the supermarket car parks deserted, and the roads devoid of the usual Sunday queues, and it struck me that Easter Sunday is the last gasp of those ‘old money’ Sundays I remember from childhood. Of course, the same applies on Christmas Day, but Christmas doesn’t necessarily fall on a Sunday.

In August, it will be thirty years since the Sunday Trading Act came into force. There are generations alive now who never knew those ‘Old Money Sundays’ bemoaned by Hancock and co but which were so much a part of my childhood. And don’t get me onto the subject of ‘Early Closing Day’, that quaint provincial phenomenon that seems now to belong to the era of HG Wells’ History of Mr. Polly. One thing remains certain: if you hanker after the vibe of those Sundays of yore, there will always be one day every year when you can recapture it.

Happy Easter!