lethargic_man | On the Isle of Lewis and the Day of Rest

During the course of work this morning, I came upon the following old news story:

Stornoway Golf Club is to decide whether to take legal action to allow Sunday golf on Lewis.

The club leases its course under a long list of regulations laid down by landlord, the Stornoway Trust.

At a meeting last month, the trust said it was "not inclined to accept" an application for club members to be allowed to play seven days a week.

The club claims the 100-year-old rule could be breaching its members' human rights.

Good grief—since when was playing golf on a Sunday a human right!?

Actually, I feel for the traditionalists on Lewis. The impression I get—no doubt biased due to an incomplete understanding of the situation (but hey, what can you expect from a few newspaper articles?)—is that until recently this was one of the last places in the country where Sunday was observed as a Day of Rest, and the relentless pressure of consumerism stopped, for a day, right across the island; but in the last few years with the advent of flights and ferries to the island, consumer society has been relentlessly assaulting the island.

No doubt some of the islanders welcome this. But for others, it means an end to their world: the genie's out of the bottle, and now there's nowhere to go to get away from it all. And as a religious person myself surrounded by an aggressively secular society, I can sympathise.