ARE you doing enough of it – shopping? The government says we’re overdoing it in the out-of-town supermarkets and underdoing it in “the great British high street”. So, in order to correct our habits, social engineering is proposed.

Brandon Lewis, communities minister, and Anna Soubry, business minister, have announced a consultation, saying: “This government is determined to devolve powers previously held in Whitehall to local people. That’s why we want to give local leaders, mayors and councils, the power to decide whether Sunday trading is right for their area, and to give their retailers the option to stay open for longer.”

I’m at odds with myself over this. As a believer in individual freedom and personal choice, I don’t like the idea of anyone – whether it’s Whitehall or local Alderman Clegg - telling me when I can go to the shops. But then I question whether further relaxation in the laws about Sunday trading is either necessary or desirable. Haven’t we got enough shopping already in the hypnotised consumer culture which is so pervasive and aggressive that we’re even urged to turn up at the January sales on Christmas Day?

Our little local Tesco is open from six in the morning till eleven at night every Sunday and that’s more than enough for me. My requirements are simple –? the Sunday paper, a bottle of milk and a bottle of wine. But I know this is not the sort of thing meant by the word “shopping”. Under the pressure of relentless advertising and the need to keep up with the Joneses, for many shopping is now an obsession, an addiction and something approaching a secular religion. There are shoals of people who go shopping on a Sunday with the zeal that used to be reserved for attending chapel.

I’m incurably old-fashioned and I look back fondly on the Sundays of my childhood in Leeds. Sunday truly was a family day then. It started with breakfast. Cornflakes on weekdays but eggs and bacon on Sunday. Then there was the sacred rite of Yorkshire puddings with lashings of gravy at 1pm. We wore different clothes on Sunday – our Sunday best – and these were what we put on to go with our parents for a stroll in Armley Park. There was always a proper sit-down tea as well, modest as it might be, with slices of spam and a few lettuce leaves, dolloped with that 1950s essential, salad cream. Sunday evening, it was mum and me against dad and my sister in a long session of dominos. There is something to be said for making one day in the week different.

I know we need economic growth and it is sad to see the declined state of some of our high streets. But there is something depraved and inhuman about our pursuance of this goal 24/7. “Where is the life we have lost in living?” asked Tom Eliot. Yes, but where is the life we have lost in shopping? There are other deficits such as poorly paid shop-workers driven by financial necessity to work anti-social shifts and rotas.

There is always the funny side. Last week the Church of England belatedly offered its reaction to the prospect of more Sunday shopping and declared: “Sunday should be preserved for family stability and community life.” Where have the church leaders been living? Sunday as a day preserved to be different disappeared 40 years ago. And, just as an afterthought, I’d have more respect for church leaders who said: “Sunday should be preserved for the worship of God.”

They wouldn’t dare.