GIRL TALK - Column

Greedy corporates ruin Easter
A few days ago I had a Creme Egg and it was awful. Terrible. The worst I've ever eaten. And all because it was January.
In the want-it-need-it-must-have-it-by-yesterday world that we all now live in, there remained a few honest traditions I clung to that reminded me there are some things that just can't be hurried.
The lazy turn of autumn leaves followed months later by the slow, shy arrival of a fresh green set tells us that Mother Nature has her own pace that won't be pushed by commercial pressures and our modern obsession with speed over substance.
Children's bed and bath routines, test cricket on stinking hot summer days and Trivial Pursuit when you're committed to winning all six pieces of pie are traditions that will not be hurried and which will have their moment in time regardless of ticking clocks.
Creme Eggs used to be the same.
A bit like the falling leaves, they have always arrived in autumn and their sudden appearance on supermarket shelves a few weeks out from Easter acted like some sort of edible circadian clock. Cracking through the chocolate shell and into the overly sweet centre for the first time in early April, I instantly and yet imperceptibly knew right where I was in time and space.
Seeing them at the end of January wasn't just wrong, it was corrupt. Sharing these thoughts with friends revealed that the insidious creep of commercial voracity had even spread to the bread aisle where hot cross buns weren't just for sale, they were ON sale. It was so wrong.
Just like kids now email their wish list to Santa and it always features a wildly overpriced iPod Touch at the top instead of a push bike or chocolate orange, the excitement of Easter is also being ruined by commercialism and the greedy corporate lunge for a small wedge of our disposable income.
What use is Easter Bunny come Sunday morning in late April if his target market have spent the past several months with their sticky fingers caked in his signature dish? Where is the pleasure that comes from the pain of being denied Creme Eggs for eleven months of the year?
Easter Bunny is obsolete. In our pursuit of instant and constant gratification, annual traditions have become surplus to requirements.
Taking our time, doing without and generally just being patient about are last century behaviours.
Even that bastion of unhurried pleasure, five-day test cricket, has been superseded by done-and-dusted 20/20 with its blingy corporate colours and commentators who sound like they're in a hurry to get to the loo.
So incapable are we of sitting still and waiting for something to happen that even our national game has been shrink-wrapped into seven-a-side, seven-minute halves. Honestly, you couldn't even eat a Creme Egg before a game of Rugby Sevens was over. Which isn't actually a problem now, because you can buy them in multipack mini sizes - yet another heartbreaking discovery and a nod to yet another modern disgrace: convenience packaging.
What hope can we have for the children of tomorrow if they can't even eat a full-sized creme egg and delight in the sticky mess such an innocent pursuit inevitably creates? It was heartbreaking enough when the advert with the two naughty children sitting at the back of a dusty classroom eating illicit eggs got ditched in favour of something more modern.
The worst thing is that, despite my horror and the subsequent offence at seeing Creme Eggs in January, I was too much of a rampant consumer to resist them.
Yes, I bought a couple and ate them with the hungry zeal of an addict denied a drug, but at the same time a little bit of me died inside, knowing that never again would I know the feeling that comes from getting exactly what you want after so long being denied it.