Tilly in a Spitfire cockpit

I'm now on holiday, moving around in the West Country. And presently I'm in South Devon, staying for five nights at the Modbury Caravan and Motorhome Club Site, deep in the South Hams countryside. It's very peaceful. But it's also a wet morning, and so I felt like catching up with my blogging. I said a short while ago that blogging wasn't going to command the same attention in my life as it once had, but it's awfully hard to live up to that. Lots of little things happen to me every day, and some of them deserve a post. Here's one.

Today is my great niece Matilda's 5th birthday. I knew this event was approaching; it's in my diary. Unfortunately so are many other things at this time of year, all to do with my present holiday, and I missed the entry that was meant to prompt me into buying and posting a birthday card to her in good time. With, of course, a £10 note inside it. At five years old, she is just about old enough to handle a little spending money of her own. It has to be cash as I'm so far away - as I always am at this time of year - and can't visit her in person with a proper gift.

This card should have been bought and posted two or three days ago, at the latest. I realised I'd missed the posting deadline only yesterday afternoon, a Saturday. And I couldn't immediately pop into the nearest town, buy a card and send it on its way to her. I was in the middle of hauling the caravan from Lyme Regis to Modbury. It was mid-afternoon before I was set up and able to whizz down to the nearest likely source of children's birthday cards, Kingsbridge.

I have to say that yachty, arty and historic Kingsbridge is a great place to buy any kind of greetings card, from the trashy to the sort that an art connoisseur would like. I got what I wanted. I sat down to write Tilly a nice greeting. And then remembered that her father (my nephew Michael) had mentioned, when I saw him last, that by the end of July they would have moved - and I didn't have the new address! Stymied.

A quick phone call to Michael got no answer. And a quick text to his wife Cheryl didn't get a response. Were they totally incommunicado? The last posting time in Kingsbridge for a Monday morning delivery (a day late for Tilly's birthday) had by then already passed. Perhaps they would get back to me with the new address overnight.

Next morning, I had the bright idea of texting my niece Jenny. She'd surely know where Michael was now living. And she did. She got back to me at once. So Matilda's card is now ready for posting somewhere where the postal service might be good enough for a Monday morning delivery. Which means a trip into Totnes, Dartmouth or possibly Torquay. No problem!

Here's the card.

But none of the foregoing is really the subject of this post.

Opening the packaging for the card that I decided to send (I bought more than one), I found a leaflet. It was from FiveStarDays.com. It invited me to select a gift for the person having the birthday, steering me to their website. There I could pay for a wide variety of experiences for the lucky recipient. There were 1455 gifts to choose from.

Nearly all of them were (in my view) way too expensive, but they were certainly likely to provide a pleasant and memorable experience. Here's a selection - a few screen shots off my phone - from among the first thirty.

Well, I can certainly see that being treated to one of these gifts would be very well appreciated by some! I can, however, think of people who would be put on the spot by the whole idea. While a river boat cruise might be nice, such things as llama trekking for two, or a sushi workshop, wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea. Besides, there's a London bias to many of these gifts, and their giving might involve the recipient in an unwelcome amount of ancillary hotel and travel expenditure, probably more than the gift itself was worth. Then there would be the trouble of finding child and pet minders while the couple - many of the gifts assumed that two people would be indulged - went to the theatre or learned how to make chocolate.

And something else. This adult-orientated leaflet was with a card intended for a very young girl! Somehow that jarred. I suppose that the leaflet was aimed at the adult buying the card, and not at all at the ittle girl, planting an idea for someone else's birthday. But this note of across-the-board, indiscriminate commercialism seemed inappropriate. It must be a sign of the times: any vehicle is the right vehicle, so long as it drives sales.

I once read a disturbing science-fiction story about a future in which advertising was uncontrolled and had gone mad. People were so bombarded with ads - in their face and subliminal - that their everyday behaviour was largely controlled by the manufacturers. So that one could make major purchases, like yet another car, completely without conscious thinking. Your income was spent for you; and there was dreadful waste, as everyone had so much in the way of unwanted and unneccesary purchases. It was a dystopian world that might have seemed possible in the 1960s, but is unlikely now, with growing concern over resources, disillusionment with consumerism, and a general move towards decluttering one's life. Perhaps that why it's become easier to sell 'experiences' rather than manufactured goods. And why it might pay to slip a leaflet offering a night's stargazing in Wales, or a 'flight' in a Spitfire simulator, inside a child's birthday card.

Footnote: I hammered out the text on my laptop in html before Bluetoothing it to my phone. But otherwise the post was put together - with pictures taken and inserted - all on my phone, and published from there using mobile internet on 4G. From the Devon countryside. I'm still amazed at what can be done with just a phone.

To think that all my parents did when on holiday was write postcards and tackle cryptic crossword puzzles...