The Four O'Clock Rush

The Four O'Clock Rush

 Sunday 22 February 2026

It’s twenty-five to four on a Sunday afternoon, and I’m sitting in Costa Coffee with my daughter, waiting for the car wash to finish. Through the window, I can see the panic building. Trolleys are being shoved through the Tesco doors at a pace. People are almost running. The shop shuts in half an hour.

Of course, it will open again at seven tomorrow morning. The gap is barely fifteen hours. But watch the faces, and you’d think the last supply ship was leaving port.

This is what scarcity does to people. Not scarcity of food, the shelves are groaning. Not necessarily a scarcity of money, though that shapes everything. Scarcity of time. These are people whose working lives squeeze their leisure into such a narrow band that the loss of even a few hours of shopping availability triggers something close to desperation. The Sunday trading window doesn’t just close, it compresses. Everything that couldn’t be done during the week, everything that a stretched and exhausted life deferred, gets rammed into the final thirty minutes before the shutters come down.

And here is where it gets interesting because the Sunday trading laws that create this weekly spectacle are, at root, religious. The Sabbath. A day of rest. And what strikes me, sitting here with my coffee going cold, is what that ancient idea actually tells us.

Even religions born in subsistence, in societies that had almost nothing, where every hour of labour could mean the difference between eating and starving, even they understood that time away from work was not a luxury but a necessity. The Sabbath wasn’t a reward for productivity. It was a recognition that human beings are not drones. That rest, leisure, and presence with family and community are not what you earn after the work is done. It is part of what makes the work and the life possible at all.

But it goes deeper than that. The Old Testament doesn’t merely permit rest; it commands it. It frames it as godly. God rested on the seventh day, and in taking the Sabbath, humanity is not just recovering from labour. It is mimicking divinity. Rest is not the absence of something. It is holy, spiritual, deep, crucial. It is close to godliness itself.

And that is worth reflecting on. Look at the most dramatic rendering of the Sabbath, the Jewish Shabbat in the orthodox community. They won’t carry money. They won’t pick up the phone. They will do nothing but be with their family and engage in spiritual discourse. It is a mitzvah, a godly act, to make love on the Sabbath. Everything human is gathered into that pure and sacred day. They will even cancel other holy days if they interfere with Shabbat. The Sabbath stands above all.

At the bedrock of our culture, then, is something extraordinary: the veneration, the sanctifying, of the human being’s capacity to love each other and to love the world around them. To perceive and experience. Surely that vision of the Sabbath is purely about perception, about experience, about the exquisite sensory drinking in of the external universe and the internal life it awakens. It shows us that the way forward has always been there in the human soul.

FOME, at its heart, asks only what we as a species have asked for thousands of years. A Buddhist monk in meditation, a Christian in a monastery, a Jew on the Sabbath, a secular person contemplating the beauty of existence, focusing inward and outward at the same time. All of it, every last cultural gem of spirituality, urges us on in the same direction: that our real role in the universe is to observe it, feel it, and love it.

The ancient world looked at its own brutal scarcity and said: Even so, you must stop. You must put down the tools. You must be human for a day.

Three thousand years later, we have an abundance that those subsistence farmers couldn’t have dreamed of. We have mechanisation, automation, and supply chains that span the globe. We are richer by every material measure. And yet here are people pounding through the doors of Tesco at ten to four on a Sunday, panicked by a closing time that a Bronze Age shepherd would have considered sacred.

The Sunday trading laws are imperfect and unevenly applied, so that some people get their day of rest and others work to provide it. But the impulse behind them points to something true. We have always known, from the very earliest civilisations, that a life consumed entirely by necessity is not a life at all. The Sabbath was humanity’s first formal protest against the tyranny of scarcity.

What we have never managed, what we have always wanted and never achieved, is to make that protest universal. To build a society where the Sabbath isn’t one day grudgingly carved from six days of toil, but the default condition of human existence. Where leisure is not the exception but the foundation. Where people are not drones who occasionally get to be human, but humans who occasionally choose to be productive.

That is not a utopian fantasy. It is what every technological advance in history has been for. It is what the Sabbath always pointed toward. And it is what scarcity, even now, even with all our abundance, still prevents.

My daughter tugs my arm. The car wash is done. Outside, the last trolleys are clattering through the doors.

The shop will open again in the morning. The question is whether we can build a world where nobody needs to rush through its doors.