How can we have bank holidays but no banks left?
THE year’s first bank holiday of spring comes and goes. The coast is well sprinkled with people who as usual don’t quite know what to do when they arrive. They stare at the beach but few actually venture on.
They stare at the sea but even fewer are brave enough to venture into that inhospitable element.
The sun shines but it is deceptive. Who would be foolhardy enough to cast a clout?
We are only in early April. May is nowhere near arrived, never mind out. And then there’s that wind and its cutting edge.
No matter, they argue - this is the bank holiday, this is the coast and this is where we come.
It is time to enjoy ourselves. People wander and drift and seagulls hover, ready to pluck a chip from any unsuspecting stroller.
Seagulls are the bossy boots of the coast, the avian equivalent of those canine XL bullies who seem to have muscled into our world of late, mainly to cause us more grief.
How many people love seagulls? Again, how many people love these cold-eyed dogs?
I don’t know why we still have the name bank holiday. It’s not as if there are any banks left. At least not in public view although I’m pretty sure bankers are beavering away below the surface, out of sight of the general public and making billions for shareholders and directors.
I recall my own local NatWest branch in Whitley Bay, even if the memory is slowly becoming sepia tinged. I would chat to several cashiers, know them by name, exchange pleasantries.
Now NatWest is a faceless organisation and nobody chats to me about anything.
The branch has gone along with the vast majority of NatWest branches. Like most other banks, it is becoming dehumanised computerised, digitalised. Slowly we are nudged towards doing our banking online. Soon we will be asked to breathe online, give birth online, blink online, think online, live entirely, 100%, 24 hours a day, online. There will be no such thing as offline.
If I look online for the nearest NatWest branch it refers me to Newcastle city centre or South Shields.
The latter, it assures me is only two and a half miles distant, failing to realise that in between myself and that town lies the fast-flowing River Tyne.
I could of course swim. Swimming is good for you as witnessed by the daily trudge of bathers to the beaches of Cullercoats and Tynemouth, many of them at an unspeakably early hour. Their pulsing good health shames me. Back to bank branches. They are rapidly disappearing. They are considered surplus to requirements. They are an endangered species. Where is David Attenborough to save them?
Yet hands up anyone who knew the name of their bank branch manager, even when we had bank branches?
In the 1960s in Nottingham I would often play cards with my bank manager. I nearly always lost. Though if the banks do disappear from the High Street it will mean many lonely people will become even lonelier.
Did you realise there is an epidemic of loneliness? We need a Government department of loneliness, but governments don’t like to admit such an epidemic exists,
Plus which all present Government departments are now in a state of total collapse.
Let us look on the bright side. Such a collapse can be seen as good news. We shall at long, long last be rid of this crew and though the future may still be bleak, how could it possibly be as bleak as the present or the immediate past?
Hello April. According to the poet T. S.Eliot, it is the cruellest month and it is true that it hasn’t stopped raining for a week.
Planet Corona – The First One Hundred Columns, IRON Press, £8.