Jennifer Horgan: Why I’ll never buy from Amazon again – a lesson in time and human connection

I have found the last long-term resident of an old street in Cork City.

I press the buzzer. Outside is quiet, deserted really, with only one shop and a small hotel across the way. My mind drifts back to Amazon — and my reaction, processing it.

The door at street level eventually opens to reveal Fred, behind him a steep carpeted stairway. The walls are dotted with photographs of flowers.

“I took those in Fitzgerald’s Park years ago,” he wheezes, his voice strained by years of smoking. I find out later how his habit first started.

“I slammed my finger in a door in anger when I was a child. I convinced the grown-ups that smoking would help the pain,” he jokes, showing me the finger with the gap in its middle. “This is my memorial to my temper.” 

We’re sitting at a large mahogany table in his front room, decorated with ornate wallpaper, religious pictures. Fred wears a wine-coloured shirt and a patterned tie.

“My mother died when I was ten, while my father was away working with Irish Shipping, so I moved in here with my aunt, my mother’s sister. That was in 1953, and I’ve been here since.” There were few cars on the city street, and he played with other children — including Rory Gallagher.

“A group of us played cowboys and Indians with cap guns we’d get in Woolworths,” Fred continues. “When you’d shoot them, they’d leave off a bang. Or we’d put a wallet out on the road tied to a piece of string. Somebody would reach down to grab the wallet, and we’d yank it away.” 

School with the Christians Brothers up the hill was a tougher experience. “I made a promise to myself after my time there that I would never hurt another human being, either physically or psychologically, and I think, I hope, I’ve kept that promise.” After secondary school, Fred went to train to be a priest with the Dominicans.

“To be a priest you need to have 110% faith, and I didn’t have that. I knew that if someone came to confess a sin to me, I would just feel sympathy for them, but the Church wanted me to condemn them. I was always caught in that tension, so I left.” 

He spent years working with young people in the community centre in Blackpool, teaching them debating, and in a residential home for young people, helping them with their homework and checking in on them every evening.

Capitol Cinema

In the early 80s, he got the job of general manager in the Capitol Cinema and was there in 1989 when it became the first 6-screen cineplex in the country. Footage on the RTÉ archive captures a young Fred sharing the exciting news on the steps of the brand-new complex.

“I remember how happy I was when people enjoyed a night at our cinema. I would watch snippets of all the films so I could advise people. I knew the regulars. I remember one nun who came in a lot, and she turned up to see The Commitments. 

I told her, 'Now you know there’s a lot of bad language in this one, Sister.' To which she replied: 'Sure for fuck’s sake, I’ve heard it all before' 

 Three years later he suffered a stroke and has been at home ever since. “I never thought I’d still be here, thirty years later.” 

Time. Fred has me thinking of time. How strange it is — how it passes, stretches, thins, repairs.

Now in his 80s, he savours memories, stories, and days spent in the company of people. Whatever hurry I was in before arriving, scrolling on my phone, I’m with Fred for an hour before I glance at it again.

Time has slowed.

Standing stones

The city outside his door had me thinking about time, how we spend it, before I arrived. Walking to the end of South Mall at the turn to Grand Parade the day before, I’d come across standing stones created as part of a collaboration between sculptor Tommy Lysaght and members of Cork Simon Community and Headway Ireland.

These are monuments to time. The stones show great diligence — all part of the beauty of the work. Lysaght got the stone from the most westerly quarry in Europe, on Valentia Island. One went to Simon House on the Victoria Rd, one went to Headway, which helps people with acquired brain injuries, and one went to his studio in Crosshaven.

It was slow work on native stone. There were 40 or 50 people involved in the project in total, with twelve people involved in carving. It was about giving back to the community. It took hours and hours of work, the participants chipping, chiselling, and carving away together. The stones are a gift of time and beauty to us all, from people who have endured significant setbacks and injuries. They are not something you could ever order quickly or cheaply online — that’s the point. They have human time, delay, reflection, effort, even pain, built into them. It takes standing by them to understand.

Walking up the way in Shandon I found another devastating example of time passing, and in this case, time passing when people have so little of it. Mohammad Timraz is currently on the ground in Gaza, where the death toll, according to local medical sources, has now exceeded 50,000.

The exhibition in the Firkin Crane features raw depictions of life in Gaza from artists as young as three from 'The Artist’s Tent,' founded by Mohammed Timraz to provide for his community in Deir al Balah.

Two of those children are now dead — their lives but a moment in time. But they are made immortal by their artwork.

If I hadn’t been wandering around the city, I would have missed these two hugely reflective, moving experiences.

And so, sitting with Fred, I come back to thinking about Amazon, realising why I was so bothered by the headline an hour before. I dislike the idea of their new website, despite its promise to help small businesses, offering them better reach and faster delivery for customers. I dislike it because it manipulates our relationship with time.

Amazon is selling us back time, manipulating us into thinking efficiency is what makes us happy, when what makes us happy is time spent together, however inefficiently. It is what we most remember. It marks our lives as our own. I hear that in Fred’s stories — running to Woolworths with his pals, greeting cinemagoers at the Cineplex. How different his life would have been if he had ordered his toys on Amazon, watched his films at home … And yes, he witnessed progress and change, but none that emptied the streets, the shops, the houses. None that took away human experience, basic interaction, shared space. That has all happened in the years since he retreated to his home.

How different my day would have been if I had emailed him.

Amazon gives us back time, so we don’t have the bother of going into a city, a shop, to buy what we need, but that bother is ultimately what sustains us. Amazon, and all the other services that allow us to do what used to be experienced communally individually from our phones, trick us into an insidious form of self-harm.

Eventually, I let myself out of Fred’s house, no need for him to scale the steps again. He thanks me for coming. I wonder who his next visitor might be.

And I make a promise never to buy anything on Amazon, new website be damned. I want to spend the time I have left fully, with meaning and abandon.

Because however Amazon might spin it, what is most precious, most unique about my life, deserves more of my time, not less.