I long for a time that was less money-grabbing | Verity Lush

Perhaps this nostalgia is simply another symptom of my decline towards my dotage, and I’ll soon be starting each sentence with an obligatory ‘in my day’, but I can’t help but look back and think that there was something a bit less materialistic, a touch less cynical, and a smidge less cash-grabbing about what were, once-upon-a-time, the ‘new year’ sales.

Amazon seems responsible for killing the high-street, or at least for twisting the knife into the wound that supermarkets and the internet initially gauged open, and now we are bombarded with perpetual promises of great discounts, whereas great community, great health, and great human spirit seem so much more appealing.

If you have a platform, use it to give praise where it’s due

The dawn of a brand new decade.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that we were all worrying about the non-existent Millennium Bug and partying as though it were 1999, simply because it was.

Have you thought back over what you’ve done, or achieved, or loved or lost over the past 10 years?

It’s a period that goes by in the blink of an eye, yet it’s also a substantial time period in which change can and will occur.

Time may be a social construct but it’s a crucial one, allowing us to earmark events, or plan and gauge, and plot and review.

The decade culminated for me in a house move – almost ten years since we moved into our last home.

Since moving in, we have had a lot of work completed in a short space of time.

Some of it has been by people who were excellent workers with a solid ethic of hard graft and doing a job right.

They came and left leaving us with nothing but the fruits of their labour – no mess, no fuss, and all for an extremely good price.

This was never more apparent than when the cost of the work – with added extras that popped up along the way – came to less than the labour alone of another quote we’d had.

That had been given by a bloke who then let us down at the last minute anyway.

And thank goodness, because he was clearly keen on fleecing us.

In terms of local companies, if you need anything of a building nature completed to a high standard, and wish for it to be done at a fair price with consultation from start to finish, then the lovely Sam and his team at Virtuous Developments come highly recommended.

I’m in the privileged position of being able to write nice things about nice people in this column.

So, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not getting paid to advertise Sam and his services.

I am simply praising someone publicly because, all too often, the only things we make the effort to put in writing these days are the bad ones.

It is time to punctuate and put a full stop after 2019

There is something deeply cathartic about clearing away the Christmas decorations.

It is always lovely to get them out and reminisce about the memories attached to each one, but a blowing away of the cobwebs contributes to that sense of a fresh new year beginning.

I remember asking my father why it couldn’t, like the song suggests, be Christmas every day. He explained the sense of something being special purely because it happens only once a year.

The packing away of everything for another 12 months helps to pop a full-stop under 2019, as we embark upon the third decade of a century so many of us feel started only yesterday.