Don’t you ever think convenience is, well, getting out of hand.

What began as convenient  – tv dinners for those too rushed to peel the potatoes stepped up a level to embrace teas-mades and bread-makers. Then supermarkets to save the chore of going from shop to shop. Ready made sandwiches, ATM’s so you can get your cash conveniently 24/7, drive-thru hamburger joints, iPods and nutribullets to save chewing.

Driven by an exponential lust for bargains at any price – monetary or human – the internet has upgraded labour saving conveniences into a digital fervour. Respecting neither physical or moral boundaries e-commerce has replaced the effort of searching, moving, immersing, walking, reading, thinking, talking, spelling, and writing in the certain knowledge that all of that may be achieved whilst sat infront of the telly, with an end result of stuff as cheap as chips. This is the new shopping Eden of effortless clicking. Cars that drive themselves are next, and there’s talk of virtual holidays too. Relax and tan with no more effort than is required to slip on a headset.

Now look around, high streets are falling apart. Shopping centres, community hubs, reinvented as avenues of dereliction. But why go to the shop when it’s so much more convenient for the shop to come to you. So much so that without sufficient footfall 50,000 shops in the UK are deemed surplus to requirements. 6000 shops have closed in the UK this year alone. I don’t know what it’s like where you are but in Bodmin, Newquay and Truro, once thriving regional commercial hubs, the high streets are papered with to-let signs. I counted eight empty retail premises along a stretch of high street the length of a cricket pitch. It’s such a mess City of London hedge fund managers are making bets against retail companies exposed to consumers, or the lack of them.  The vultures are circling. 

On the bright side it’s encouraging that forever inconvenient businesses are moving into some of the vacant premises: barbers, cobblers, nail studios, cafes. Things you can’t get online. But there’s only so many of those one high street can handle.

And what about all those vans ferrying stuff around? It might not be so bad if it was (excuse the pun) one way traffic. But the very nature of e or m-commerce (shopping with smart phones) is you can send it back if it doesn’t fit, or the colour’s wrong, or you wore it to the party and don’t want to wear the same outfit twice. National Returns Day is the day of the year when retail companies receive the most returns from online sales. With Britain way out in front of every other country on the planet when it comes to online shopping we are thriving upon the convenience of shopping for everything from t-shirts to televisions and fitted kitchens on our smart phones (m-commerce) whilst engaged in something else: I saw a lot of n-bus on-tube shopping m-commerce in London last weekend.  At the last count, January 3, 2018, UPS reported 1.4 million returns. Factor in a lot of self employed driving in knackered diesel powered delivery vans and is it any wonder our kid’s brains are not developing and 40,000 are dying each year of diseases linked to poor air quality. 

Almost weekly a shopping/high street guru (!) steps into the debate to pronounce what shops and high streets should do to survive is improve ‘the shopping experience’, and hammer cash strapped councils to do away with parking charges. As if it’s the shopkeepers and council’s fault and not online retailers like Amazon corporation was, at the last count, responsible for the closure of thousands of bookshops in the US. I don’t know how many have gone over here but it’s a lot. I haven’t used his company for over 10 years and refused to include it as a retailer in my Sunday Times column. Sometimes I look online to see how much cheaper my latest book or CD would have cost if I’d opted for the convenient option? It’s usually a few quid. But like I say to the call centre staff who encourage me to shop and pay my bills online (because they’re told to), if we all did that they’d be out of a job. 

Of course Amazon sells much more than books and is moving into groceries with plans for drones to drop eggs on us from the skies. Owner Jeff Bezos knows we like online click convenience that way he can complete his mission of destroying the world I grew up in and rather like, and make himself the richest bald-head in the world.

It wouldn’t quite so bad if people like him paid their fare share of taxes, and business rates equal to those on the high streets. Last year, just as tory austerity was starting to seriously bite in hospitals and classrooms, Amazon made a profit in the UK of £99m and paid tax of £1.3m. But that’s ok because shopping with Amazon is convenient. Schools, and hospitals, and the police and the social services and care homes and youth services and, you get the picture, are so, so – dependent society.

Prior to this world of internet uber convenience criminals wore balaclavas and carried bolt cutters. Nowadays they can sit infront of a computer screen on the other side of the world and steel our money safe in the knowledge that when it comes to it, nine times out of ten, the banks will blame us for being too casual with the book loads of passwords we all have. According to UK banking’s own figures over £1bn was stolen online in 2016 and by June of this year (2018) £500m had been taken. It’s a win win for banks that have closed just under 3000 branches in the past three years. No wages, no rent. Just a lot of unhappy customers and shareholders laughing all the way to their tax haven.

To recoup the millions banks, through their greed and stupidity, lost in the financial crash of 2008 they are encouraging customers to bank online. Not by making online banking any better or safer but by closing banks so we have little choice. 30,000 people came to my town last weekend for a Christmas festival yet as of January there will not be a single bank or ATM. How long before no cash shops and pubs? What then for people who can’t open a bank account because they – haven’t got a mobile phone number (that’s right, that’s one of the big reasons) or they’re unemployed, or their residency is in question thanks to someone’s bright idea of leaving the European Union.

Only this month Marriott hotels revealed personal data, including the names and addresses passport and credit card numbers of around 500 million customers were stolen. British Airways, the NHS, the Pentagon, even my Groucho Club has been hacked. In the old inconvenient days that would have meant a lot of pick pocketing. Now it’s just a USB drive away. 

Frankly I’m not that big on shopping per se. But it’s preferable to sitting on a sofa staring at a smart phone and waiting for a Deliveroo dinner. I like high streets. Chatting with staff and other customers, and giving a few coins to buskers and rough sleepers. It’s mostly the life I grew up with. OK, that’s just a bit of journalistic license as actually there weren’t that many rough sleepers in Whitton in the 1960s. But we had shops. Lots of them. And banks. And funnily enough lots of barbers. 

Even my daily newspaper, The Guardian, is in on the convenience shopping binge. Despite articles about the death of the high street its consumer articles promote online only shopping websites like they couldn’t give two hoots about high streets. A high proportion its touted e-commerce sites, where items of clothing cost less that the cost of shipping. What was all that about ending disposable clothing to slow down global warming? I  honestly don’t get it.

I find it very inconvenient to drive six miles to the nearest bank and four miles to buy a box of screws and twenty five miles to buy a CD. I cannot be the only digital Luddite in the western world who craves inconvenience? Flicking through CD racks, or asking the salesperson if I can try on another size and colour? Writing cheques to pay my bills, and sending letters and cards and buying stamps and walking to the postbox. Engaging with the outside world and doing all I can to avoid it all crumbling down.

Don’t mistake my griping for some dewy eyed vision of a John Major 1950s England where everyone played cricket and AA patrolmen saluted you at the side of the road. My inconvenient world is the one where people have jobs and earn money and live in comfortable houses and the neo-liberalists, the sharks in suits with their cosmetic surgery and shiny teeth, and populist blandishments and political aspirations, pay their taxes and keep their heads down. Or better still clear off. 

The internet is unquestionably convenient for them’s who want to see their grandchildren on the other side of the world, or post photographs of their meals to the bemusement of others, or for finding their way home and seeing what the weather’s up to? All marvellous. Let’s not allow such limited convenience create a jobless world of inconvenience for all.