Why Sunday ought to STILL be a day of relaxation, says PETER HITCHENS. Shops ought to shut in order that households can keep collectively – similar to in my childhood

Would you protest against your local Tesco opening on a Sunday? The chance would be a fine thing in most of the UK, where the idea that Sunday is a day of rest is a forgotten mystery.

Tesco is open and that is that. But some of the people of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis are still fighting against the supermarket giant’s decision to start trading on the Sabbath on November 17.

It is part of a long, slow war between the modern world and the old one, which reached its final stage with the introduction of Sunday air services to the island, in 2002, and Sunday ferries in 2009. Yet Lewis still has a very high proportion of Christian believers, and the idea of Sunday as a day of rest is still one of the Ten Commandments.

A century ago, that would have counted for a lot. Remember the whole plot of the film Chariots Of Fire, in which Eric Liddell refuses on principle to run in his Olympic race because he has been timetabled to do so on Sunday? Millions applauded him then. Now most people laugh at such niceties.

The Lord’s Day Observance Society and the National Secular Society have both been involved in the Stornoway stand-off, but was there ever really a contest? Tesco, of course, says that ‘jobs will be created’, the excuse for almost anything remotely controversial, which could equally well be used for a new casino.

And they say that nobody will be made to work on Sunday. Well, no doubt that is true. But imagine, when the shifts are being drawn up, what it might be like to be the person who didn’t want to take on any Sunday work. Compulsion isn’t the only thing that enforces conformism to the new world.

Residents of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis are fighting against Tesco’s decision to start trading on the Sabbath on November 17

I am very sorry for the Christians of Lewis. Couldn’t we still have somewhere in these islands where the old ideas were still respected? Like them, I have a soft spot for the notion that society should have one agreed day when – within reason – everyone is free from what the poet Philip Larkin called ‘the toad, work’.

It has to be the same day for everyone. It is no good just allowing people to have a day off at some point. It has to be an agreed day of the week.

For there has to be some time when families can get together. If there is no such time, families can weaken and break, as they lose proper contact with each other and drown in the sparkling, flashy culture in which we work most of the time and then buy our lives back with the coin of fun, as the American sociologist C. Wright Mills once tellingly described it.

I write this wistfully as a serial Sabbath breaker, who chose to work in the newspaper trade. I have, as an entirely predictable result, spent much of my life actually working on Sundays. I have no real excuse for this apart from ambition or self-indulgence. It’s not like being a doctor or a fireman. I can’t claim anyone would have died or suffered if I hadn’t worked. I did it because it suited me.

But I wish, for many reasons, that it hadn’t worked out that way. It isn’t the person who works on Sunday who is damaged by it. It is the people who would have preferred him or her to be at home.

I remember Sundays as they were in this country 60 years ago. In the small Devon town where I was at boarding school, the loudest noise was that of church bells. The streets were bleakly empty. Traffic was sparse. The pubs opened for two hours at lunchtime and then for three hours in the evening, in both cases after church services had finished.

It isn’t the person who works on Sunday who is damaged by it, Peter Hitchens believes, but the people who would have preferred him or her to be at home

Even the weather seemed different. I associated Sunday with black skies and icy downpours of rain fresh from the Atlantic.

The peace and the absence of commerce were irksome to me as a child, and later as a teenager – for much of this persisted well into my adulthood.

Of course religious believers (as I am) have their own reasons for wanting a Sabbath rest. But a lot of non-religious people liked a day that included a relaxed lunchtime in the pub, followed by a Sunday roast.

As George Orwell put it in his essay The Decline Of The English Murder: ‘It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk.’

He then described how ‘Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant’.

And in these blissful circumstances, what is more enjoyable than to read about a horrible murder in the newspaper, as we used to do, and sometimes still do? It is in fact a very good description of the somnolent, silent, domestic Sundays we all once had, perhaps relieved by an uplifting Charles Dickens adaptation on the TV. It was a day quite different from any other day, and I miss it.

Peter Hitchens writes that there has to be some time when families can get together. If there is no such time, families can weaken and break, as they lose proper contact with each other

True, it was dismal for the lonely person, as Christmas can be. The French wit Hyppolyte Taine described Victorian London on a Sunday as being like a ‘vast well-ordered cemetery’.

And I see no objections to a few concessions. There was always at least one shop open, for Sunday papers and small purchases like biscuits. But if you think the idea of a Sabbath day is dead, you only need to travel a bit on the Continent or in the Middle East.

In modern efficient Germany, shops start closing on Saturday lunchtime and if you can’t do your shopping while they are still open, your neighbours will think you are an idiot. You aren’t allowed to make a noise that might bother your neighbours, such as hoovering the house or mowing the lawn.

In Jewish Israel, trains don’t run, and in the more religious areas, such as Jerusalem itself, a deep peace falls. It is actively unwise to drive through the more militantly devout parts of the Israeli capital, where using a car on the Sabbath is considered sacrilegious and extremely rude. In some tower block hotels, the lifts run continuously, stopping at every floor, so guests do not have to press any buttons – which is a breach of the Biblical rule against work.

In Cairo, on a Friday, a delicious holiday atmosphere descends on the city as everyone rises late, and thousands slip out to the bakers’ shops to collect great honey-coloured discs of fresh bread for breakfast, before multitudes crowd into the hundreds of mosques for prayers. Something similar happens in the Iranian capital, Tehran.

You do not need to be part of it to be impressed by the unity of it, and – if you are me – to envy the peace and release from the clangour and urgency of everyday.