Newsreport by Miriam Dunn

An old fashioned sort of gal

‘A dog is for life, not just for Christmas’ reads a sticker that I have seen on many a car window.

Worthy words indeed, warning people that a pet is not a short-term gift to be given during the festive season which can be discarded soon after.

But the same motto does not seem to apply to many other durables that we either buy or are given.

Consumer products nowadays seem to have a shorter life span than ever before.

We are coerced by clever advertising into buying things we will never have any use for or replacing things we already own with newer, trendier models.

I lived in the UK during the 1980s, those Thatcherite years when materialism went mad, reaching levels of distaste that could never have been imagined. A twinge of conscience re-emerged in the nineties, when consumerism, although never to go away, dressed itself in more discreet and less ostentatious trimmings, so to speak.

But ‘loads-a-money’ and ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ seem to be back with a bang in our new millennium. Tony Blair’s New Labour has less to do with Socialism and more to do with Socialites, according to the amount of carrier bags that women are armed with as they stride purposefully down the High Street.

Even the 11 September atrocities don’t seem to have dampened or dented consumer mania as Christmas approaches.

I have no problem with buying nice things, be they for me or for others. A good old ‘shop-till-you-drop’ does wonders for the soul, and retail therapy, as many a woman will tell you, can be quite cathartic in its own way.

But the kind of adverts we are now seeing for certain products are blatantly materialistic – so much so that I am swallowed up by a tide of depression at the prospect of witnessing a revival of what became known as the decade of decadence.

Ashamed of your old mobile phone? Goes one.

The latest must-haves, goes another.

Why should I be ashamed of my mobile? And why must I have an eighties-revival off-the-shoulder top? Apart from having a golden rule that I will not wear revival clothes if I remember wearing them first-time round, the bottom line is that as soon as the trend dies, those clothes will be lying in a discarded heap at the bottom of my wardrobe.

And that’s the crux of the problem – we use and discard at a frightening pace. Nothing lasts, a lot isn’t even built to do so, and it’s dumped on the scrapheap hardly before it’s out of the box, bag or wrapping paper.

Example. My mobile phone does what it was invented to do, it allows me to make and receive calls. But according to the TV and magazine ads, I should be ashamed of it because there are smaller, lighter and more colourful versions of it around.

And much more importantly, all these other, newer phones do SO much more. They allow you to receive your e-mail and let you play little computer games and have a neverending choice of ringtones.

It seems that just talking to someone on the phone is not enough any more! Am I jealous? Hardly! Not only do I quake in my shoes at the prospect of trying to understand the gadgetry that I will need to learn to be able to do all of those wonderful things; I also wonder exactly when and where people find the time to do them. What will they invent next, a mobile phone that fries us breakfast on Sunday? If only…then I might actually take notice!

Seriously, am I the only one that wonders whether we are tripping over ourselves with inventions, innovations and hi-tech pioneering?

Ads blitz our TV screens for Microsoft Windows XP, Pentium IV, the new Fiat this, Ford that or Audi the other, hardly before the plastic’s off or the paint’s dry on the last model.

Nothing gets used up any more – a lot of it hardly gets used at all. But with a penchant for going against the grain, I will obstinately hold onto my big, heavy, ugly black phone. It rings, it lets me talk to people and I understand how it works. It might not turn into a loofah in the shower, but somehow I think I’ll manage.

Saviour Balzan is away from the island. His column will appear next week.