Black Friday: a dark day indeed

Sunday, November 30th, 2014

The utter chaos that Britain's first Black Friday was met with beggars belief. People were tearing at each other to get to bargains they believed they had to have, even going so far as to physically assault fellow shoppers and abuse retail staff.
I mean, is anything worth that: losing your dignity just to get your grubby hands on a new telly?
Black Friday is, of course, an American thing, and what happens in America almost inevitably makes its way to the UK eventually, for good or ill. In several states in the US, people are actually given a public holiday on Black Friday so they can get in the midnight queues early. As a result, the first Friday after Thanksgiving has been the busiest shopping day of the year every year since 2005 in the States.
This year was the first time it's really been picked up on and actually pushed en masse in the UK. Everywhere I went in Manchester on Friday, there were signs and adverts telling me the day was black and that I could get so much per cent off this, and it could well be my last chance to get that essential gift at such a knockdown rate.
And the streets were packed. I mean, severely congested to the point that you were barely able to move freely without either treading on a small lost child, or bashing shoulders with a frenzied housewife with consumer hara-kiri on her mind.
And it saddens me that this anti-social and frighteningly damaging annual ritual is being promoted in the UK. Christmas is stressful and expensive enough as it is without retailers smugly trying to wring even more pennies out of those who cannot afford it by trying to convince consumers that they really have to buy it today - not tomorrow, not closer to Christmas: TODAY! It's your last chance, or else you'll be paying twice the price, and probably for less.
I fear for the pockets and bank balances of those in Britain who really cannot afford to fall victim to this consumerist pressure. Retailers should take responsibility and refrain from putting undue and unnecessary pressure on people to spend, spend, spend what they haven't got. People will pile up their debts on credit cards and then find themselves in even more trouble in January than they might have if they'd just stuck to sensible, paced Christmas shopping throughout December (or earlier!).

And the violence that broke out on November 28th in the UK, where people attacked one another in supermarkets in desperate attempts to get the last cheap iPod or whatever, is unacceptable, yet depressingly predictable.
Metropolitan Police chief Sir Peter Fahy rightly said: "The events... were totally predictable and I am disappointed that stores did not have sufficient security on duty."
Greater Manchester Police's Deputy Chief Constable Ian Hopkins echoed these sentiments, saying that while shoppers' behaviour was appalling, the lack of planning from retailers was "really disappointing. They should have planned appropriately with appropriate levels of security to make sure people were safe. They have primary responsibility to keep people safe and they can’t rely on the police to turn up and bail them out."
The Black Friday phenomenon is only going to get worse year on year because we live in a consumerist society where electronic goods and multimedia and pointless tat like loom bands and woolly Christmas jumpers are valued more highly than simply making sure there's enough (not too much) food on the table and having a happy, family-orientated day in the spirit of Christmas.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not religious, and I certainly don't begrudge people a bit of fun and frivolity, but the destructive power that Black Friday has demonstrated this year has to be kept in check, for all our sakes.

It's all very well giving Tesco and Asda and all those other multinational retail giants bigger profits sooner, but what is it doing to our society, to our debt-ridden and those on restricted budgets who feel pressured into buying when they really needn't?

I hope that if Black Friday rears its ugly head again in 2015 - which it will - retailers take responsibility, and mediate and control its marketing, make sure there is security on their doors at one minute past midnight, and above all, don't encourage mass debt.

But then this is the UK. I shouldn't expect so much.

Researching my family history

Thursday, November 13th, 2014

My paternal great grandmother and great grandfather

I keep trying to research my family tree, but I quickly get very frustrated with the whole thing. For the last few years I've been gathering information about my immediate family from parents, my grandmother and uncles etc, and that helps to flesh out the chequered history of the family over the last century or so.
Recent times are the easiest: just ask mum or dad about their mum and dad and already you've gone back two generations. If your grandparents are still alive (I only have one) then they can take you back another generation, probably into the 19th century.
So I have managed to get names and birth dates, sometimes marriage and death dates, going back on my father's side to the 1870s, and in some instances a little further than that.
But it's around the late 19th century when I get really confused. My surname is not too common, but it's also straightforward enough to mean there are far too many branches of the name to know if I'm on the right tree or not. And of course, 100 years ago you didn't get helpfully individual names like Shane or Monica or Jethro or Apple like you do nowadays - everybody seemed to be called either Thomas or Elizabeth!
I have discovered some interesting things about my paternal family, however. Although I hail from the Midlands, it seems my father's family went to Derby from Barrow in Cumbria, and before that lived in Ipswich, and before that in Dagenham in London. They moved around plenty, perhaps in search of work.
I also have pictures of some of my ancestors, and it's the ones I never met that I feel most curious about. My father's grandfather Thomas was a typically Victorian gentleman with an impressive moustache and there's a lovely photograph of him in his latter years in my grandfather's back garden with his wife, and they look so sweet - he in waistcoat and pocketwatch, she in apron and hobnail boots. I feel like I know them; I certainly feel like I want to know them.

My great grandfather and his son, Leonard

It's weird seeing pictures of your ancestors. They were real, they lived and breathed just like you and I, but somehow it's hard to believe that when they are mere words on a page, and a set of dates.
When you see their face, they come alive once again. I always say that nobody ever really dies, just so long as there is somebody on Earth who remembers them. Memories keep everybody alive.
Another aspect of researching ancestry I find very confusing is military history. I know my grandfather served with the Territorial Army in the 1920s and the Home Guard in the 1940s, but I have absolutely no idea where to start looking into it.
I'm a member of Ancestry.co.uk but it seems to me there is too much information on there for me to sort through. I need to be trained in how to use that site!
But I am fascinated enough to keep trying. My great-grandfather (he of the pocketwatch) would have been in his 30s at the time of the Boer War. Did he serve in the military? I tend to think not as I think he was a blacksmith, but it's so hard to find concrete confirmations for things. The 1901 and 1911 Censuses are a goldmine of surface information, but anything earlier than that and my great grandfather seems to get lost among all the other men who seemed to share his name.
I shall keep trying, persevering, because I want to know more, I want to know where I came from, perhaps in order to know where I'm going...