Not for nothing did John Osborne set the opening and closing scenes of his play Look Back in Anger on a Sunday. If you wanted to strangle England in 1956 – to wring the neck of its tedium and small-mindedness, its primitive habits and dreadful deference – there was no better place to start or to end. “God, how I hate Sundays!” says Jimmy Porter to Alison, his long-suffering wife, and Cliff, his oblivious friend. “It’s always so depressing, always the same. We never seem to get any further, do we? Always the same ritual. Reading the papers, drinking tea, ironing. A few more hours, and another week gone. Our youth is slipping away. Do you know that?” The three of them toy with the idea of going to the pictures. But there is no real enthusiasm for such an outing. No one, not even Jimmy, can raise himself out of what he calls, disgustedly, their “delicious sloth”.
I remember this sloth. Osborne and his compadres did their best to shake things up, but Sundays, if nothing else, remained almost entirely resistant to change until the mid-90s, when shops and pubs were finally allowed to open or to extend their hours (the Sunday Trading Act became law in 1994, at which point large shops were permitted to open for six hours on Sundays; 12 months later, new legislation meant public houses no longer had to lock up between 3pm and 7pm).
The stultifying feeling that there was nowhere to go and nothing to do was partly, of course, all in the mind. Even if the shops had been open on Sundays in my youth, they would have been no use to me; I had no money to spend. The moors were still there to be walked over. A library book and Smash Hits were still there to be read. If you had legs, you could very easily exchange your own bedroom for that of your current best friend. But still, a suffocating hush prevailed. The house, suddenly too full, was half coop, half waiting room. After lunch, families lounged about uneasily, hoping only to make it to Songs of Praise without having a row.
It goes without saying that I wouldn’t want to go back to all this. I want to see people and I want to see life. (That’s Morrissey, by the way, a man whose Sunday melancholia made the teenage me feel a whole lot better about my own.) But oh, how the pendulum swings. In the budget last week, George Osborne announced that in future local councils will set trading hours on Sundays, a move that will inevitably see their extension, for what hard-pressed council is likely to favour shop workers’ rights over a boost to the regional economy?
Meanwhile, in the capital, tube drivers went on strike over Transport for London’s decision to begin running underground trains on five lines 24 hours a day at weekends from September (the overground service and Docklands Light Railway will follow suite in due course). People tend to talk about the 24-hour society rather blithely, as if it were just fun, fun, fun. But now here it comes, a little closer, and a lot more loud and exhausting. At what point, I wonder, will their nonchalance shade into hollow-eyed panic at what it is that we are saying goodbye to for ever?
Everyone feels it: this pressure, this noise. Some of it is literal: the supermarkets whose lights are always on; the trains that never cease clattering across the tracks. And some of it is virtual: the emails that keep coming all through the weekend; those incredibly “helpful” websites that keep a person hunched over their laptop, face aglow, when they should really be asleep.
And it is making us ill. Dead-of-night trains and crack-of-dawn groceries are a boon for shift workers and clubbers, but for those who must whizz passengers from one side of a city to another, or stack shelves beneath fluorescent lights, they are a less happy prospect. All the evidence suggests – and there is plenty of it out there – that night work, however well-organised, however well-remunerated, can have a serious, even catastrophic, effect on the health and family relationships of those who do it (it has been linked to type 2 diabetes, heart attacks and cancer).
Those who live close to stations and 24-hour stores struggle to escape the light and the noise that make sleep difficult. Those who receive emails even when they’re trying to have a rare day off are preoccupied at best, absent at worst, and permanently tense into the bargain.
Ask yourself this: isn’t there always a tickertape running through your mind of all the things you could be buying and ordering and speed-reading and speed-writing? Then cast your mind back 15 years or so. Wasn’t it then a good deal easier truly to enjoy your supper, to settle down into a novel, to go to bed before midnight?
Forget the debate about the green belt. This is a world with no space in it, no air. The mind still wanders, but dumbly, un-creatively, in the direction of – choose your poison – eBay, John Lewis online, Ocado or Asos. We’ve all but eliminated the time we used to spend thinking and talking (I mean really talking, not the hurried emails – “sending love” – we now use even for the purposes of sending condolences to the bereaved), sitting and staring. Above all, we’ve exterminated the very particular boredom that comes with unplanned, expansive time – the “sloth” that once came as standard to us all at least once a week.
A news story informs me that some parents now devote £3,600 to ensuring their teenagers remain strangers to ennui during the long summer holidays; that most children will spend at least 95 hours of their vacation checking social media sites on their phones and tablets. But as the great children’s author and illustrator Shirley Hughes pointed out last week, having received a lifetime achievement award from the Book Trust, boredom itself can be productive, even liberating: it was as a fed-up child that she first took up her pencils.
In truth, I’ve never had much time for Jimmy Porter and his ilk, those peevish little Englanders who secretly relish the status quo even as they rail against it. But on the issue of Sundays, I used to think he had it just right: they crushed you, made you feel half-dead (“Why don’t we have a little game? Let’s pretend that we’re human beings, and that we’re actually alive”).
Now, though, I begin to see them in a different light. At least they were a break, a means of wiping the slate clean – something of which we are all sorely in need if we are to keep body and soul together.
