Black Friday and our sad mindset this side of the Atlantic

Black Friday is upon us.

It’s particularly remarkable on this side of the Atlantic. The Friday is black in the US because people are recovering from the excess of the Thanksgiving celebration the day before, or just need their morale boosted in the down that follows the high of a feast. Though behind that worthy goal lurks also the rather baser desire to make a lot of money by a day of sales in the shops.

In England, we don’t have the feast. We just have the Black Friday. The depression, in other words, without the celebration that led to it. But it’s still a wonderful commercial opportunity. Or at least shopkeepers hope so.

The problem arose because of the increasing disappointment of Christmas. This is the second most important feast of the Christian year. Believers worship the birth of Christ in December just as at Easter they celebrate the redemption of man through his agonising death followed by the miracle of his resurrection. Birth at Christmas, the even more glorious rebirth at Easter. .

Clearly, celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace is a time for quiet reflection on the nature of God’s relationship to Man, the sacrifice of his incarnation and later death in pain for us all, and so forth. Where “so forth” covers over-indulgence in food and, above all, drink as well as the commercial miracle of a splurge of spending in the shops. Why, a great many retailers depend on Christmas for the bulk, if not the entirety, of their profits for the year.

Such are the benefits of a profound immersion in the spirit of Christian charity and restraint. An excellent arrangement. Serving God and Mammon, otherwise known as win-win.

Although it’s not that wonderful any more.

Britain has seen earnings falling for a decade already. There’s no sign of that ending any time soon, particularly following Brexit. Eventually, inevitably, loss of earnings power had to have an impact on spending patterns. Christmas just isn’t what it once was. Shops can’t count on it any more.

The answer was to find a way of incentivising expenditure at another time of year. And why not just a few weeks before? Adopting Black Friday seemed the obvious solution.

But we took it over without Thanksgiving. Meaning we have the depression not the celebration. The hangover without the party. 

What’s more, we don’t seem to be satisfied with just a single day of it, which after all is what the word ‘Friday’ would seem to imply. Oh, no. Ocado, which kindly delivers us our groceries, has gone for a long weekend of Black Friday. 

Ocado:
Black Friday from the 23rd to the 27th

And Debenham’s, the great department store, has gone for a whole week.

Black Friday week at Debenham's

This all seemed terribly British. After all, we are a nation steeped in the Protestant tradition. That teaches us that we are all, or nearly all, damned whatever we do, and life is a vale of tears. So when we take on a tradition from the US, why not take on the bleak and dismal bit, leaving out the part that might actually lift our mood?

But it’s not just British. I was in Italy over the last few days, and I noticed that even that great bastion of Catholicism has caught the Black Friday bug. Indeed, they too, perhaps out of increasing desperation over sales falling there as they are here, are wildly extending the understanding of ‘Friday’. In Turin, they’re going for a Black weekend.

Black Weekend in Turin

Maybe it’s a European phenomenon, not just a British one. Are we so short of confidence in our ability to emulate transatlantic flair and dynamism that we punish ourselves by taking on their harsher customs, and use them to try to dig ourselves out of our economic difficulties? Seems a bit of an indictment.

A sad thought. One to while away a Black Friday. As an alternative to spending the day in the shops.

Conventionally ill-prepared

The secret of success is preparation, preparation and meticulous preparation.

Different companies have different ways of celebrating Christmas. My last one put the accent on fun. The venues and the food were good but not exceptional, rooms were laid on for anyone who wanted to stay over and there was a free bar. Partners/spouses were welcome. Hair was let down and people had a good time.

My present company has a different approach. The dinner was in one of London’s better restaurants, the kind that gets rosettes or stars in various guides. Partners weren’t invited. And it was black tie.

I love that expression, ‘black tie’. It’s a test in itself. Either you know that it’s code for ‘wear a dinner jacket’ (OK, OK, tuxedo for you out there in the colonies) or you fall at the first hurdle.

Now I haven’t worn one of those monkey suits for donkey’s years. I still have one, bought for some stiff occasion with a bunch of health service accountants twenty years ago, but for aeons it has done nothing but hang in my wardrobe. I never complained about this state of affairs, as I always dread the idea of ‘black tie’ events. The sheer formality makes me cringe in anticipation, which  probably explains why I didn’t get round to climbing into uniform until late in the afternoon of the day itself.

It shouldn’t have been that late, but I went to a customer presentation beforehand, about 27 miles away. At a pinch, you can drive 27 miles in not a lot over half an hour; if much of the journey is in built-up areas, you might take an hour. Even my sat nav suggested 52 minutes. But a little snow fell, and that was it. Bingo. Gridlock. It took me two and a half hours to get home. That’s significantly longer than it would have taken in the age of horse transport.

So it was pretty last minute when I started to dress up. I turned to the suit first: to my relief, I could still get into it. Danielle thought it was horribly old-fashioned, but then isn’t it the whole point of dinner jackets to be old-fashioned?

Then came the infamous black tie itself. As I looked at mine I was struck by the dilemma that this article of clothing always triggers: can I remember how to tie it? There comes a point in tying a bow tie when it’s obvious that what you're going to do next has absolutely no chance of producing a knot; then you do it; and miracle of miracles, a knot is formed.

And before you ask, I don’t wear a ready-made bowtie because, hey, where would the fun be in that?

So I had the suit and after twenty minutes of struggle I had established I still knew how to tie the tie. Then came the sickening heart-stopping moment when I realised I didn’t actually have anything to put under the tie. You can’t wear a dinner jacket without a dress shirt, and I couldn’t find one anywhere.

Something missing

It was 7:30. I needed to catch the 7:46 train. Maybe if I got the 8:04 I could still just about make it. Later than that and, well, I’d be late.

At that point Danielle came in.

‘You know your cufflinks?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I never wear cufflinks, which irritate me as much as dinner jackets. If God had meant us to wear cufflinks, I feel, he would never have given us buttons.

So I hadn’t seen my cufflinks for months. Nor, it now transpired, had Danielle. ‘They’re somewhere safe,’ she told me. ‘I put them somewhere really secure when we moved so they wouldn’t get stolen. So you can rest assured they’re safe.’

‘But not actually available?’ I felt obliged to ask.

We leaped into the car and drove into the town centre. At ten to eight on a Friday evening in Luton, practically everything is shut, but fortunately not that great department store, Debenham’s, whose praises I can’t sing loudly enough.

Minutes later I was doing a swift change in the car, and managed to catch the 8:20 stopping train that got me to the restaurant 30 minutes late. But at least sporting a smart new dress shirt, cufflinked at the wrists, with a hand-tied black bow tie and an old-fashioned but entirely serviceable dinner jacket. And with a nagging feeling that I might have done well to check all these items earlier.

And the evening itself? My colleagues welcomed me to the dinner with great and, to my astonishment, apparently sincere cordiality. The food and wine were outstanding, the company friendly and cheerful. What I had initially dreaded turned into a perfectly pleasant evening. More conventional than in the last place, certainly, but it managed to be just as much fun.

However, the fact that it worked out well in the end hardly excuses my woeful lack of preparation, does it?