Bank holidays now permanent on high streets

ANOTHER weekend, another bank holiday Monday. That’s three in a row, in a month.

You wait all winter, then they arrive in convoy like London buses. Now, there’s only one between Whitsun and Christmas. A positive desert of days off.

This feast-day coincides with the permanent holiday that the banks are taking from our High Street.

My branch of HSBC in Skipton closes in two weeks, ditto the one in Ilkley. Across the country, what I call Hong Kong and We’ll Shanghai You is shutting 114 banks – a quarter of all its UK sites – this year.

Lloyds is closing 62 banks, NatWest 106 and Barclays 122. So, who are the real bank robbers? Greedy finance bosses say this profiteering move is due to a shift to digital banking. Partly true, I’m sure, but only because customers are being coerced into going online.

The time-honoured expression “High Street banking” is obsolete. In fact, the banks are strongly instrumental in the destruction of our high streets.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t more pubs called The Old Bank than there are the real thing.

These days off should no longer be called bank holidays. Call them after saints, or heroes. The banks have put two fingers up to us all. But I mustn’t forget the traditional significance of this holiday, the Christian feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples.

When I was growing up, Whitsun was the Sunday when churches staged walks through the town. One for Protestants and one for Catholics.

Girls came out in their new summer frocks, and boys, well, they did as best they could. If we couldn’t get out of it altogether.