So today is Black Friday. What? What the hell is that? I’ve heard of Good Friday and Friday the Thirteenth Parts One to Ten-and-a-half but I absolutely refuse to know anything What So Ever about Black Friday. It has no meaning here. It is a hollow import which some traders have latched onto to sell Even More Stuff because, let’s face it, Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night just ain’t enough to fill the gap between holidays and Christmas. I’m daily expecting some marketing whizz to come up with a selling point for Michaelmas (29th September) so that once the stocks of school uniforms (pens, pads, textbooks) are exhausted we can all buy – well, whatever it is they might come up with. I mean, why should September miss out when January has holidays, February Valentine’s, March and April Easter eggs, May and June gardening and July and August family holidays? October has Hallowe’en and November Guy Fawkes, after (or during) which Christmas begins. And what has September got?
It’s just not right.
But in spite of everyone in the world wanting to be American (according to my friend in Iowa anyway) many of us resist these imports. It is not part of our culture; it has no relevance to our habits and my hope is that like a Bonfire Night sparkler, it will have but a short time to live before it withers and dies.
In my youth it was fashionable to look to America for a lead: it was still a young country (or we thought of it as such) and in the vanguard of popular culture. But now many of us regard Uncle Sam as a bloated, overindulged, gas-guzzling, obese, intolerant figure – and don’t even get me started on Trump. Sorry guys but I’d prefer Tierra del Fuego or the Isle of Lewis to most parts of the US. I mean, you have no publicly funded health system (and what little Obama managed to scrape through is rapidly being dismantled) you have far too many guns and no BBC. So thanks, but no thanks.
(On the other hand, you do have some stonking literature: see previous post –
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 