The best of times (and then ordinary time)

OPINION: Look, I don't know about you but I am struck by how fast the year's going and we haven't had three weeks of it yet, writes Pat Veltkamp Smith in this week's And Another Thing.

Might be because no-one knows quite what to call it (twenty-ten, which is crisp, okay; or two thousand and ten, which sounds somewhat portentous) and also because too many people, like me, haven't got the calendar and diaries in sync.

Now this comes about because all those firms that once inundated us with calendars no longer do so, the beautiful photographic ones given us are too fine to scrawl on.

But you can get ordinary calendars and diaries at half price now so I guess it is high time we started using them and edged into the new decade.

These thoughts were triggered by a phrase I heard in church last Sunday – "we are in ordinary time now" – a liturgical reference distinguishing between high times like Christmas and Easter and their preparatory times like Advent and Lent, and all the ordinary times in between.

These clerical terms are also taken up in the secular world, and in the retail industry the times are allowed to overlap.

Like now, we are just over the high jinks and joy of Christmas and already some supermarkets are showing Easter buns and somehow morphing chocolate-covered marshmallow Santas into Easter bunnies.

Awful, like the interminable business of selling out-of-season fruits such as imported pink grapefruit, which upset the settability of marmalade, reminding us once again that winter is the only time to make it.

Putting the right calendars and diaries to work reminds us, as indeed little else does, that this is summer, that apples won't be great but cherries, strawberries and tomatoes are; that too many bananas and grapes have left their home weeks ago so that the term fresh is relative, reminds us, too, to eat the fish we have caught, fast, and that what we can't eat we should leave in the water or on the shelf.

In ordinary time we can catch a breath, a cold, a fish – or a bargain, as sales abound.

But if we didn't want something when it was dear, why would we want it suddenly just because it is not? I don't know, but it is a sales technique that works.

Stores have all gone well beyond the traditional Christmas, New Year, Easter, summer and winter sales. Now it is all red dots.

So you wonder if it's not on sale, why would you buy it, wonder indeed if it has an "ordinary time" tag, and what then the price might be.

» Pat Veltkamp Smith was Southland Times women's editor until 1997 and is a former president of the Southland Justices of the Peace Association.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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