But the idea of going out and buying a week's worth of groceries, from a shop in the middle of nowhere with a huge car park, is just another adaptation that has come about from the ubiquity of private cars. It also discriminates against a minority.
If we used cars less the way we shop would adapt to suit.
nib
If I don't fancy a bus journey into town or the local Sainsburys (there is an ASDA a mile away). The Sainsburys is on a retail park with Greggs, M&S food, McDonalds, Next and next door to another retail park with Halfords, Shoezone, Iceland, T.J Hughes and Currys.
I have to take an Uber to my eye appointments which (annoyingly) aren't at my local hospital (a nice hours walk) but in Dudley - a 20 minute/£11 trip off peak.
Well my own Mum used to do the shopping daily - we had no freezer. There was a choice of 2 parades of shops within a (brisk) 15 minute walk. One of which was the location of the local underground and thus a portal to anywhere in London. When I worked in Marble Arch, I could leave the house at 8am and be at my desk by 9. And that included 2 miles of walking !
Studies have shown the large growth of corner shops and petrol station shops owned/run by the national supermarket chains is popular BUT at a cost with prices being much higher than in the large out-of-town stores.
I have a Tesco petrol station store and a Sainsbury corner shop within a couple of minutes walk from where I live but I only use them for distress purchases. For instance, fresh fruit and vegetables (often approaching the chuck out period) are 30 to 50% more expensive than I can get by driving 4 miles.
I assume your mother didn't have a full time job and all those shops were open when she had time during the day to shop.
The reverse of that, these days.
Well naturally. It was the 70s.
You have obviously no idea what it is like to live in a village if you don't have a car. My mother would cycle into town, some 4.5 miles, with me in a child seat to go to the cinema (pictures). She also cycled into town every week to shop come rain, shine, snow or ice. If she didn't, we didn't have anything to eat. The route was hilly & she carried the shopping home in 4 carrier bags on the handlebars & the tins & heavy items in the child seat.
Mine was an ICE, and the brakes were constantly rusting.
Paul
Along those lines, while at primary school, I thoroughly expected religion to die-off as churches ran out of old people ...
All discs rust if not used.
As do clutch plates.
Normally it doesn't take long to polish them smooth
A prediction that has come to pass.
At least for Christians.
Try driving a car with the clutch stuck ...
That's fun.
Depends how you view it. In England, certainly, "religion" has only every had a passing relationship to any sky fairies. It's always been much more about the fact that the church (as a building) was simply a sensible centre to village life. Since the church (as a landowner) was integral to everyones daily lives.
That's how England was able to go from Catholic to Protestant with no real resistance from the population. Most of whom probably didn't notice.
AFAIAC the C of E is really a rather eccentric social club. And has been for centuries.
We should be exporting that pragmatic view, rather than importing fanaticism.
Driving a bicycle takes planning.
You learn these things, as you go.
A reasonably expectation, is you could drive 200-250 days per year, and find a two hour driving window to pick up some groceries. I have driven 24/365 on a bicycle for four years in a row, at university. You are going to get wet doing that. A young person can do that, because they have the blood circulation to stay warm. (Try cycling at -10C, which isn't too cold.) I've seen people here cycle at -20C, but that would kill me.
We have a Doppler radar display here, that shows rain clouds that are producing rain, and that's how you figure out when it will be dry enough for your drive. I can go all summer here, take bicycle rides, and never get wet. Each weather pattern has "odds" associated with it. If there are popcorn thunderheads on the display, the Doppler can't help you then, as a rain cloud can appear from no-where on the display. Most rain clouds "glide" across the display, making estimation of their velocity and rainfall amount, relatively easy.
As for accurate maps of bicycle paths, forget it. Nobody makes decent maps for the purpose. The "hand sketches" the city makes, are just awful. When there is construction, nobody marks the path as "unpassible, construction". And then people wonder "why all these cyclists are on *my* road", well, it's because the bicycle paths have been chopped to s*it.
It was pretty funny, about a month ago, I'm driving along the *detour* around construction, and some d******ds start doing *construction* across the detour path. You just can't make this stuff up. There were no signs saying "your options are Baloney street or Sausage Ave", it's just "Construction, Keep Out". Most of us cyclists, we drove right through the construction :-) F*ck'em. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
It's quite typical, to have a construction that blocks a path, and there is no sign like two miles up the road "closed at Cedar Ave". You are expected to drive all the way down the path, hit the dead end, drive back to the next decent fork.
If you did not have a cynical attitude before you started, you will, soon enough. It really is life as a second class citizen. Good luck.
Paul
Ive dine that - had to start a van in first gear because the clutch was stuck, got it up to speed and stamped hard on the brakes and the clutch. That fixed it. I learnt to double de clutch in my youth so a clutch that has a broken hydraulic line is no big deal for me.
I got that one to a service station and bough shitloads of clutch fluid and that got it into first gear...
You were still expected to attend, however, and for quite a long time afterwards.
Very eccentric these days. SWMBO thinks that the politicians are trying their best to destroy it, as witness our soon-to-be-no-more Archbishop.
Yes.
Not until everyone else had one and she needed a job a bit more remunerative than being a housewife.
That was the transition to the sixties. Women went out to work and the price of houses therefore doubled. Now wifey didn't have time to shop every day, so she used a car to carry a weeks worth of shopping from the supermarket, typically on a Saturday morning
She got a fridge to put it all in, and then a freezer, and then a microwave to defrost it. Washing was done in a machine now, and didn't take all day. Vacuuming replaced sweeping with a broom.
And so it went.
If we have to go backwards it will be with home delivery replacing the supermarket.
We have built a comfortable society based on fossil fuels.
IT will be very hard to change it.#
While that is technically true, can you imagine the outcry when the powers-that-be say to the masses: "On yer bike!".
Nonetheless it was a good thing that it happened. Why should we have been paying money to fund a foreign bureaucracy?
That was 100 years later and led to further steps towards our being a modern democratic state (Bill of Rights and so on). It also settled the religious question once and for all.
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