KATY HARRINGTON

Let’s never speak of Black Friday again

The Friday just gone, you may have noticed from the mass materialistic hysteria was Black Friday, appropriately named as it’s surely one of mankind’s darkest creations. If you have recently become a member of the Amish community and spent the last seven days up a mountain picking daisies, then lucky you — you may have been spared the abomination that is Black Friday. Most of us had to endure another year of retailers generally acting like the end of days is approaching and trying to convince the masses that any decent person who loves their family should spend the last Thursday night in November in a sleeping bag outside an electrical store to buy them a new HD TV. Who gives a fig if you already have a TV bigger than your kitchen table, and to hell with it if you can’t afford it, the miserable marketers who created Black Friday just want us to sharpen our elbows and open our wallets. Oh and we do. Every year around this time pictures of people rioting in Dixons to get 25pc off an electric kettle hit the papers, and somehow this makes everyone even more convinced to do it again next year. It’s incredible really because if you think about it, Black Friday (what with people being crushed in queues as they scramble to get exactly the same crap that was there the day before and will be there the next day) is pretty much the worst day imaginable to go shopping. At least on Christmas Eve there’s always a slightly lopsided-looking dad who stinks of beer hopelessly scrambling for presents in Waterstones, but Black Friday has no such last minute charm. It’s a grotesque sacrifice to things with plugs, and we need to un-make it a thing now. My plan to defeat Black Friday is simple, it doesn’t involve leaving the house because all we need to do is simply never mention the filthy words again.