It is amazing just how much our lives are being changed by the credit crunch. Some of it is desperately serious when you see the statistics of small companies that were once buoyant, if only just, now going to the wall. The whole thing is so totally unfair. Those responsible both in the financial world and in the political one, those who gambled, and those who allowed them to do so without restriction, seem to have got away without redress. The question a lot of us are asking is, why the financial programmes on television are reeling out figures of the daily rise and fall of the stock market, which seems contrary to what the uninitiated would have expected, when so many people are now being conservative with their finances, if they’re lucky enough to have any? Are we really now having the regulation that we should have had?
On the frivolous side, from where I sit, we are being short-changed, because those in the entertainment world, and especially Skye, are cutting the suit to suit the cloth. While the advertisements have risen in quality, but unfortunately also in quantity, the entertainment products offered, are below par . They are giving us films that they dredged up from the archives, now virtually unwatchable, as the whole industry has moved on, and which haven’t been watched in generations, because they were so bad. Repeats go on for ever, quality is often replaced, by hysterical hype It is also noticeable that members, once at the top of the entertainment industry, whom we respected and admired, are now being used to persuade us that certain insurance products, and financial companies are operating to our advantage. Have these celebrities the nouse and done the research to qualify to give those who trust them an honest appraisal? I have often found that the people who need the help most, are the ones most trusting.
On the home front, the big enterprises, that still seem to make the profits, are offering inducements to increase sales, at a level that the shop on the corner couldn’t match. In my lifetime I have seen such a change in shopping habits that could never have been predicted. Now that I am chair-bound, no longer able to drive, I miss the shop on the corner, or the shopping area within walking distance that was so common when we were young. A combination of the car taking the place of public transport, big business in the world of domestic shopping, and large housing estates without a single shop have wrecked a change which will be hard if not impossible to reverse