Some years ago now, I came back from the High Street to find someone washing our car. It turned out that Peter, as we will call him, had rung our doorbell and asked my husband, who happened to be in, for a bucket. Peter had no tools but wanted to work. He did not like begging, he told us when we sat round the kitchen table having a cup of tea but, for reasons which became all too clear, he had no other option.
From that day on, for several years, he came by often and I heard both the sad story of his life and the various stages in his rehabilitation, which is now happily complete. He has been housed by the Council and is looking for work, and you would not know from his appearance that he had ever been wandering the streets, hungry and penniless.
All well and good. But coming to my door had become a habit with Peter and, after being disturbed by him for the nth time, I asked him to stop coming, just as I had asked friends not to drop in when I used to work at home.
But how, oh how, can I stop the ON LINE shopping?
Only yesterday, a very wet man with two big, wet packages (see below) almost wept with relief when I said he could leave them with us. But why am I taking in shopping when I have shut the door against someone needing a bit of human warmth?
There is never a time when the doorbell is not an interruption. The only time I am not in the middle of doing something is when I’m asleep. The rest of the time I am listening or reading or on the phone or in the loo and not best pleased at having to answer the door: even less pleased if the bell has woken me up.
We like all our neighbours and the concept of neighbourliness, but when people are out at work all day, what do they think is going to happen to the things they are having sent to their home addresses?
Oh for the days when we all did our shopping at weekends or after work, and brought it home with us. The only things sent were the things too big to carry. There was less traffic in the street and there were no drones in the air frightening the London sparrows: they, too, now a thing of the past.