I, for one, welcome our digital overlords

I used to be very sniffy about the internet - not its avowed purpose, which is to propagate information and to allow instant communication, but its reinvention as a giant, virtual Argos.

I do still have massive reservations about the march of on-line retailing.  Okay - it's quick and convenient, but what happens to the centres of our towns and cities when all the shops close down?  And they will, let's face it.  And people who witter on about towns "being given back to people" are talking out of their fundaments.  Towns and villages have always had commercial premises at their hearts, encouraging people to congregate, discuss, foment revolution and generally to revel.  All those smokey inns in Shakespeare and Dickens - what would London have been and become without those?

Well, you can answer that question for yourselves.  Take yourself off to a village in the home counties on any given Sunday.  Chances are it will have been long since denuded of its pub, village shop/post office and any other commercial premises.  The reason for this is that home counties villages have become dormitories for London.  The people who live in them are generally newcomers, attracted by the peace and by the size of the housing stock.  They use them like apartment hotels: they sleep and ablute in them, but little else.

Without the patronage of locals (who sell up to accommodate the newcomers), the village pub goes the way of all flesh.  Ditto the village shop - people who work in London, shop in London.  What remains is a facsimile of an English village: half-timbered maybe, but half-dead too.  I've wandered around villages like this hundreds of times during country walks, and the feeling of isolation and joylessness that pervades them is horrifying.  No-one spends time outside their house because there's perceived to be no point.  There is no point.  I don't stand outside my (London) house, saluting passers-by, but I see and chat to my neighbours all the time when I'm rushing to and from the shops and pubs that surround my home.  That's how community is reinforced.

So next time you buy a kipper or a surfboard, do yourself and England a favour - do in an acutal shop, eh?