DO you remember going for the ‘big shop’ with your mum on Saturday afternoons? I’ve only limited and partial nostalgia for the 1970s. I recall my childhood freedom to run wild in the fields with my friends with great fondness.

However, most kids back then were fundamentally survivors. Adults drove us home from visiting auntie pie-eyed on booze, blowing smoke in our faces. Grown-ups in the seventies were dangerous, either by design or accident.

Despite my protestations, I was forced by my Primary Four teacher to write to Jimmy Savile asking to go on his show. A programme and presenter I hated as a child. I’ve never trusted flamboyantly dressed mavericks - to me they’re walking, talking red flags. Thankfully, I didn’t make the cut.

That teacher though, she enjoyed punching kids to the head with her diamond ring. For the seventies, she was merely an average brute.

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So to kids, the 1970s were both wonderful yet weirdly dangerous. Perhaps explaining why Generation X grew up a feral mess.

There were, though, certain traditions and foibles from the Seventies which remain warm and fuzzy in my heart, like those trips to the supermarket on Saturday afternoons with my mum.

After Swap Shop (Google if you’re under-45), we’d head down the town. In a mere hour, she’d buy enough food to feed a family for a week. Nobody seems capable of such feats of domestic calculation these days. Certainly not me. Seemingly powerless to remember my own needs when it comes to eating and drinking, I end up shopping nearly every day.

Mum worked all week and dad was incredibly sexist and lazy so back in the 1970s nobody was popping to the shops for odds and ends until Saturday rolled around again. And of course, every shop was shut on Sundays.

After the Saturday ‘big shop’, kids and dogs went out to play and didn’t return until supper in front of the telly with Bruce Forsyth and The Generation Game. Saturdays were a day of fun and treats before the boredom of shut-up Sundays.

Sundays. There were prayers on TV, homework, you weren’t allowed out unless it was a trip to your granny’s house for tea with doilies on the table. Then she’d lick her hanky and clean your face with spit. On Sundays, all you had to rely on was books and your imagination.

At the time, I hated Sundays, but looking back, they were the best of days. My family wasn’t church-going so I didn’t have to endure Sunday school or any such god-bothering. I curled up with Roald Dahl or Robert Louis Stevenson. I invented elaborate battles between my toy soldiers.

Stornaway harbourStornoway harbour (Image: staff) Action Man would scale Everest (the hall stairs), swim seas (the bath) and parachute into occupied territory (get chucked from my bedroom window into the back garden). Sometimes he’d tame and ride mighty beasts (my pet dog Tramp, a neurotic and bisexual Dalmatian).

Sundays, I think, changed my life. It’s Sundays that made me a reader. It’s Sundays that grew my imagination. I wouldn’t have written any of the books I’ve published without the longueurs of lost Sundays.

Although I might have hated it at the time, it’s Sunday which taught me to relish quietness today. Life in the 21st century is non-stop. I never cease marvelling at folk today who cannot sit still. They live, as we all do, a petty 24-7 existence, with a work-life balance shot to hell, but nevertheless seem incapable of coming to a halt and embracing stillness, even momentarily.

We all need solitude and calm in our lives, some hours to reflect on ourselves and make sense of the world. I think we go mad without stillness. Which may explain the madness of this world which never rests. We need boredom, too. Without boredom how can the highs of life have piquancy? Boredom is where thought finds its fertility.

On the Isle of Lewis there’s a fight going on to preserve the stillness of Sundays. Of course, it’s mostly religious - though some of us ungodly types on the island have joined the battle too. Tesco, you see, wants to break the ban on Sunday opening and have supermarket tills dancing seven days a week.

For once, I’m with Free Presbyterians. The world is a gaudy, stupid place today - if the world took human form it would have a fake-tan, tooth veneers and an iPhone stuck to its face.

I love that one wee part of the world up in Stornoway wants to keep that gaudy stupidity at bay. Even if the respite is for a mere one day.

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I hate to bail on my new religious friends, but that day of respite doesn’t necessarily need to be Sunday. Just one day - any day - of quietude from the infernal racket we make as a species would be heaven; one day when we come to a stop, when we quit spending money on garbage we end up throwing away because it failed to fill the gaping hole in our souls.

Shut Sundays won’t bring the world crashing down. There will still be cops, hospitals and firefighters. But the rest of us could do with a break. Don’t you think?

What does it benefit us that we can go to Tescos on Sundays? Do supermarket workers not deserve a day off like workers in banks or offices? Can we not - like my dear old ma - buy all the messages we need for Sunday on a Saturday afternoon?

Look, maybe some can’t imagine a quiet Sunday. Maybe they feel compelled to shop every day - maybe consumerism is their religion. Even so, don’t they need a day without praying to their idols in the mall?

But the economy has to grow, doesn’t it? That’s what we’re told: spend, buy, consume, don’t stop, don’t sit still, just do and keep doing. Keep going. Until you drop.

We’re becoming like the pointless stuff we buy, baubles that get worn out and break easy. Maybe if we allow ourselves a day on the shelf once a week to recover - and allow Sunday to reclaim its special place in our lives - we might bear this world a wee bit better.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer-at-Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics