{"id":31776,"date":"2025-08-29T23:22:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T23:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/31776\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T23:22:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T23:22:10","slug":"perrins-beware-the-march-of-convenience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/31776\/","title":{"rendered":"PERRINS: Beware the march of convenience"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat do you think of women playing rugby?\u201d Clive asked me.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think they should do it,\u201d I replied. This was a few years ago in the bar after social tennis in London, the best part of my week. Clive had just celebrated his 80th\u00a0birthday and there was women\u2019s rugby on the TV. Progress, I\u2019ll be told.<\/p>\n

Clive was born right at the end of the war, his father died in service when he was an infant. North Africa I think it was. His mother raised him on her own, through rationing which didn\u2019t end until 1954 in Britain. Clive had a hip replacement some years back but that didn\u2019t stop him from being an excellent doubles player. Good times.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s my problem you see. I have more in common with 80 year old Clive than most other people. Every day is an\u00a0up \u2013 at \u2013 dawn siege,\u00a0for me. How I have made it to 2025 I will never know. And it will only get worse. Women should be free to play rugby, that\u2019s the truth. I know it, Clive knows but we just don\u2019t like watching it. It\u2019s too modern and not feminine enough. Still, at least it is not drones.<\/p>\n

Lord, save me from dinner being delivered by drone. That really has been my breaking\u00a0point.<\/a>\u00a0Mind you I was heartened by the response, the majority of which agreed with me. They are an assault on the senses, privacy and all things decent. I think what annoys me most about the drones is what they stand for \u2013 namely laziness. Someone, a mother or wife, has not done her job that day and failed to make dinner. So they fly in the Chinese take away by drone. Dinner by drone, like women playing rugby or raisins in a salad, is just not right.<\/p>\n

The drones, women\u2019s rugby and football, the wretched mobile phones, the demise of the Good Room<\/a>. It\u2019s endless. And everyone seems to think these are all good ideas. I can assure you, they are not. With every \u2018technological advance\u2019 a part of our humanity dies. I\u2019m convinced of that.<\/p>\n

Why is everything \u2018on demand\u2019 now? Do you know what that does to you? On demand\u00a0makes people demanding<\/strong>. I demand my double crust pizza be delivered to me by drone while I watch my On Demand TV. This is not progress, this is decline.<\/p>\n

I try to \u00a0explain to the children as they make endless demands for this from Amazon or that on Netflix, the way things were \u2018when I was growing up.\u2019 Listen here, I say, myself and my brother grew up watching Quantum Leap, a programme that was the best of Americana. That was an event, a bonding experience I remember to this day.<\/p>\n

If you did not get your bottom on the couch at 9pm on Wednesday (I think) to watch Quantum Leap on BBC2 then you did not see what happened to Sam when he jumped into the Vietnam War to save his brother. My God, that was an excellent three episodes. Sam had just been to his childhood home, to see his mother, father, sister and brother one last time.<\/p>\n

(Sam leaps from his childhood home into Vietnam to save his brother. The classic Quantum Leap.)<\/p>\n

You had to be there, I tell the children,\u00a0or you would never see that episode again.\u00a0No playback, no demand, nothing. Sure, your friends might tell you about it the next day at school but that was a poor substitute. The demand was made\u00a0on you<\/strong>\u00a0to get there and watch the programme. And once it ended and left you on that cliff hanger, the second demand was made on you\u00a0to be patient and wait a week,\u00a0an entire week, to see the next episode. When, might I ask, are the children asked to wait a week for\u00a0anything\u00a0these days? Never. That\u2019s the truth.<\/p>\n

The challenge today is not to make things easier for ourselves but to make things harder. Cook the dinner, wait the week for the next episode, hoover the floor yourself and don\u2019t get one of those machine things. Convenience is great, obesity, laziness and impatience are not.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s before the AI comes to get us. Below is the scene that greeted us when we returned from holiday from Spain.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Customer service, allegedly, with not a single human person to take our query. We flew Aer Lingus and they are usually very good. The staff are wonderful, my husband flies with them to London for work. But they damaged the luggage and the car \u2013 seat came out in half. These things happen but when we went to lodge the complaint, it was to a machine. Progress, I\u2019ll be told, but how many people have these machines put out of a job? It is just so impersonal.<\/p>\n

On and on it goes.\u00a0 People don\u2019t know what it is like to me, doing battle against modernity every day. I\u2019m a regular Sarah Connor I am, fighting the machines.<\/p>\n

(Sarah Connor finishes off the Terminator.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying I want to live in the 1880s but I\u2019d take the 1980s and 1990s any day. That was the sweet spot between the modern and the outright undignified. Today, it is one long slide into decadence. It cannot end well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWhat do you think of women playing rugby?\u201d Clive asked me. \u201cI don\u2019t think they should do it,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,4730,1067,11170,13,14,6,11,12,24958,15,16,1109,5,7,8,4319,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-31776","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-convenience","11":"tag-culture","12":"tag-drones","13":"tag-featured-news","14":"tag-featurednews","15":"tag-headlines","16":"tag-latest-news","17":"tag-latestnews","18":"tag-laura-perrins","19":"tag-main-news","20":"tag-mainnews","21":"tag-media","22":"tag-news","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-topstories","25":"tag-travel","26":"tag-world","27":"tag-world-news","28":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}