[ Preface ] [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ]  [ Notes ]

1: Beyond Goods and Evil: The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Shopping

I don’t know about you, but I hate shopping.  I hate shopping in supermarkets, department stores, delicatessens, petrol stations, greengrocers, antique dealers, jewellers, florists, furniture shops, shoe shops, convenience stores, electrical outlets, toy shops, sports shops, gift shops, coffee shops and, above all, trendy clothing shops, where I have this overwhelming urge to deconstruct, disassemble and generally de-range their carefully co-ordinated displays of co-ordinates. 

I hate shopping in large shops and small shops, old-fashioned shops and new-fangled shops, exclusive shops and déclassé shops, up-market shops and down-market shops, fashionable shops and passé shops, glitzy shops and dowdy shops, city centre shops and suburban shops, speciality shops and variety shops, multi-level shops and single-storey shops, self-service shops and full-service shops, independent shops and multiple shops, under-staffed shops and over-staffed shops, empty shops and bustling shops, quiet shops and noisy shops, friendly shops and unfriendly shops and, not least, those ‘natural’ cosmetics shops that smell like a macrobiotic Spanish bordello, only better. 

I hate American hi-how-are-you-today shops and French who-the-hell-are-you shops, I hate Japanese bowing-and-scraping shops and British the-best-a-man-can-get shops, I hate Italian you-insult-me-you-insult-my-mother shops and, it almost goes without saying, Irish to-be-sure-to-be-sure shops. What’s more, I hate stereotypes-r-us shops and faux-ethnic-get-your-fake-artefacts-here shops.  I hate non-shops that try to look like shops (airports, museums, hospitals etc.) and shops that try to look like non-shops (airports, museums, hospitals etc.).  I hate shops that seek to rise above their station (‘galleries’, ‘collectibles’, ‘bibelots’), as well as railway station shops, stationary shops, mobile shops and anything with ‘fast’, ‘swift’, ‘express’, ‘crazy’, ‘buster’, ‘smasher’, ‘cabin’, ‘pier’, ‘locker’, ‘grotto’ or ‘hut’ on its fascia.  I’m not too fond of ‘nook’ either.

I hate Marks and Spencer, I hate Sears, I hate Safeway, I hate Bloomingdales, I hate Boots, I hate Burton, I hate Benetton, I hate The Gap, I hate 7-11, I hate Late Stop, I hate Circle-K, I hate Seibu, I hate Takashimaya, I hate Aldi, I hate Eatons, I hate K-Mart, I hate Wal-Mart, I hate mini-Marts, I hate McDonalds, I hate Burger King, I hate Baskin-Robbins, I hate Principles, I hate Printemps, I hate Next, I hate Coles, I hate Macys, I hate Marshalls, I hate Mervyns, I hate Sainsbury, I hate Tesco, I hate Target, I hate Levitz, I hate Littlewoods, I hate Laura Ashley, I hate Harrods, I hate Habitat, I hate Ikea. But then doesn’t everybody. 

I hate, hate, HATE them all.

Lest there is any misunderstanding, I must emphasise that, unlike many run-of-the-mill shopaphobes, I’m a fairly sophisticated connoisseur of aversive retailing environments.  Although I abhor them all with a vengeance, the precise character of my detestation varies from situation to situation, store to store and occasion to occasion.  I’m mildly irritated in expensive shops, where tastefully arranged merchandise screams ‘rip-off’, albeit in an upper-class accent, and feel much the same way in cheaper than cheapo outlets, where the surroundings are so tacky your feet adhere to the oleaginous linoleum floor.  I’m moved to anger in shops which contain other people, be they fellow consumers, my shopping companions or that revolting breed known as shop assistants, who are prone to pounce upon or ignore you, who patronise you or over-ingratiate themselves, and who speak at all times with forked tongue whilst keeping one eye cocked for the main chance (hey, looks aren’t everything). 

However, the shopping situations that really move me into the red mist, teeth grinding, ears steaming zone, or, from time to time, call forth a primal scream from the very core of my decentred self, are: (a) standing in line; (b) when they re-arrange the store layout without warning; and (c) paying by credit card.

Now, if any of you are familiar with my, er, academic oeuvre, you’ll know that I’m not the kinda guy who likes to quote himself.  As you may be aware, there are a lot of shady characters in intellectual life, unscrupulous individuals who shamelessly plunder their past publications, ceaselessly recycle their less than earth-shattering pronouncements and, not to put too fine a point on it, slice their scholarly salamis into semi-transparent slivers that would not look out of place on the plate of an electron microscope. 

But I’m not one of those.  No sir, not me.  I would never rehash my earlier work and justify it with some pretentious, postmodern, always-already-written pabulum.  Never, I tell you.  Never!  That type of behaviour is totally unprofessional, utterly despicable and, frankly, beneath contempt.  In my view, its perpetrators should be exposed for the mountebanks they are before the good name of marketing is dragged through the mud.  I mean to say, how will our discipline ever become a fine, upstanding, law-abiding, clean-cut, freshly-showered, short-back-and-sided, clear-complexioned, orthodontically- enhanced, shirt-and-tied, pinstripe-suited, shoes-gleaming, yard-tending, Corolla-driving, squash-playing, sherry-sipping, nutri-bran-eating member of the scientific community if it continues to count cheats, con-artists and charlatans amongst its number? 

Don’t answer that.

Despite my unfamiliarity with the questionable practices of the paper re-packagers and my natural reluctance to participate in anything that may be deemed intellectually disreputable,  I cannot deny that I have previously commented on the terrible standing in line/relocating merchandise/credit card triumvirate.  However, given the nature of the present volume, it would be unforgivably remiss of me if I failed to offer you a flavour, a hint, a taster, a soupçon, of the full depth of my hatred for shopping.  Hence, I am going to quote myself for a change.  With great reluctance, you understand.  Just this once, I promise.  I’ll not make a habit of it, rest assured.  And, of course, feel free to stop me at any time if you’ve heard it already.  Before we start, however, I should make it clear that these sentiments are written in a, how can I put this?, mode of discourse that some consider unusual, many deem unscholarly and almost everyone says is unsavoury.  But what the hell do they know?  Show me where it says that works of marketing research must be written in a dry, desiccated, depersonalised, deadly boring manner. 

On second thoughts, don’t. 

Oh, you have a problem with this, do you? You don’t like my tone? My attitude? My style? My type? You’ve had just about enough of these cynical circumlocutions and self-centred, self-serving, self-indulgences, have you?  You want me to get on with it, for God’s sake, and say what I’ve got to say in good, old-fashioned, praise-the-Lord, kick-the-Pope, Protestant prose? (One adjective to every tenth noun, hold the adverbs and don’t dangle your participles.)  Does my combination of diatribe, digression and textual dilettantism irritate you, annoy you, antagonise you, drive you into paroxysms of self-righteous rage?  It does?  Really?  Good!  I’m delighted to hear it, ’cos that’s exactly what going shopping does to me. 

Verisimilitudinous, or what!

As I was saying before being forced to talk dirty about bad language, I loathe – and I mean loathe -- standing in line:

Crazy Prices has 30-odd checkouts, only one of which seems to be open when I round the final aisle.  After marching up and down the line, hoping to find another that is about to open and glaring at the herd of checkout operators, dozens of whom are gathered round receiving instructions from their supervisor or checking their floats prior to opening, I reluctantly join the queue for the only lane in operation.  There are hundreds of trolleys ahead of mine, all filled to the gunnels, all the property of wizened old ladies, all of whom remove the items at a rate of one per hour, pay in five-pence pieces and, as a long-lost acquaintance of the check-out girl, proceed to bring them up to date with the past 50-years of extended family affairs.  I bite my lip. ‘Give that granny a Prozac’, ‘HRT is available on the NHS, missus’ or, come to think of it, ‘for fuck’s sake get a move on’, are not the sorts of expression one expects to hear in mixed company at 9.30 on Saturday morning.¹

It drives me crazy – we’re talkin’ CRAZY here -- when retailers unceremoniously reorganise their stores:

Why, oh why, oh why do retailers insist on moving merchandise around the store, on relocating goods from hither to yon, on shifting me from soporific to splenetic?  Is it their little power-crazy attempt to show us who’s boss?  Do they really think that rearranging the layout somehow stimulates the shopper, helps to maintain consumer interest or tickles our collective fancy? Are they indulging in some private dispute with their suppliers to which we, the customers, aren’t invited but have to suffer the collateral spatial consequences?  I don’t know what the rationale is for relocating merchandise categories; all I do know is that it drives me up the wall when I turn into an aisle expecting to find the usual display of breakfast cereals or kitchen rolls, only to find that I’m facing serried ranks of dog food, cat litter and all-purpose worming tablets.  If I could get my hands on the store manager at that moment, I’m ram by freshly-baked baguette so far up his you-know-where that he’d never need to take another worming tablet, believe me.²

And, paying by credit card - or my credit card, at least - makes Dante’s ninth circle of Hell seem like Harvey Nichols.  Harvey Nichols is Dante’s ninth circle of Hell, now that you come to mention it.

Last Christmas, on a day when the store was absolutely heaving with queues stretching back to the delivery bays, I thought I’d [pay by credit card.  After a few minutes] the checkout operator returned to tell me that my card had been rejected.  Upping the stakes, I demanded that she try another machine and, by the time she came back with the bad news, I was not only soaked in sweat and expecting a jumbo-sized can of sweet-corn to come whistling past my ear at any second, but there were people literally barking at me from the back of the queue.  Fearing for my life, I was escorted from the store, frog-marched to the nearest auto-bank where, after pausing only to ring my wife and whisper a few sweet nothings about her failure to pay our Access bill, I withdrew enough money to cover the price of the goods, if not the cost to my dignity. For weeks thereafter I had this recurring nightmare about my grocery shopping mortification making the Sunday papers (I mean, a Professor of Retailing in a retailing-related incident) and, to this day, ensure that on entering Crazy Prices I carry sufficient cash to cover every possible checkoutcome.³

Yet when push comes to shove, as it does when I go shopping, it is clear to me that there are much, much worse exhibits in the chamber of consumer horrors than the ones I’ve just recounted.  Okay then, re-recounted.  When I dredge the bottom of my retailing memory banks and sift through the silt of all the swipe ’n’ sweat transaction traumas I’ve repressed, denied or displaced somewhere in the murky depths of my unconscious - all my shrink-wrapped, shrink-to-fit, fit-to-shrink shopping ordeals, as it were - it is apparent that my above-mentioned supermarket psychosis is just the tip of a retalienated iceberg.

The tales I could tell you. 

But to be perfectly honest about this for a moment (though if you believe that…), I find that when I try to enumerate my most horrendous shopping encounters it is very, very difficult to decide. There are just so many to choose from.  An obvious contender, of course, is the clothes shop it-looks-perfect-on-you-sir-excuse-me-while-I-laugh-up-my-sleeve-sir experience.  Love it to death.  Or how’s about the jeweller’s what-an-excellent-choice-sir-you-have-wonderful-taste-sir-your-wife-will-be-back-to-change-it-before-the-week-is-out-sir-but-she’s-got-no-chance-sir enthrallathon.  Roll on Linda’s next birthday.  And how can I forget the time-honoured take-you-for-a-test-drive-screw-you-in-the-back-seat-oh-and-by-the-way-you’ve-bought-a-lemon-that’s-depreciating-before-your-very-eyes-sir new car scam?  But at least they give you a free cup of instant coffee while you’re waiting to spend  £15-20,000 of your money (as an academic, I naturally hesitate to use the words ‘hard’ and ‘earned’).

Such stools in the excrescence of exchange, however, pale by comparison with the horror, the horror, at the heart of DIY darkness.  Do It Yourself sheds, where serried ranks of unfathomable objects bespeak all manner of household tasks that I didn’t know were necessary, don’t know how to undertake and, even if I did, would make a complete and utter mess of them, are surpassed only by their partners in retailing crime, flat-pack furniture outlets and garden centres. 

You may disagree, but sitting in the lounge surrounded by dozens of laminated chipboard planks, with only a left-handed chisel, packet of cardboard dowels and badly photocopied sheet of Polish instructions for company, is not my idea of party night -- albeit the planks are more charismatic than some of my colleagues. 

Gardening is exactly the same only you’re bemused in the open air, your blood is sucked for real, dirt finds it’s way into every body cavity, the neighbours get to hear your midas unmuffled oaths, and allergies you thought you’d finally shaken off reappear with a vengeance  Bloodshot eyes, streaming noses and filthy fingernails are such a winning combination, don’t you agree? 

To cap it all, every plant you touch instantly withers on the vine.

Worse still is going to the cinema.  It may surprise many of you to hear that, since I am something of a movie buff.   None of your pretentious, subtitled, east European, arthouse-farthouse nonsense for me, mind you. I’m a Walter Hill, John Woo, Joel Silver, Jerry Bruckheimer, Coen Brothers and the one and only Alan Smithee, kinda guy. Yet I find cinema-going - incomparable though the big screen remains - an increasingly depressing experience.  It’s not the fact that I invariably get stuck behind the consumptive or the courting couple who talk incessantly, incorrigibly, inanely throughout the movie and then stand up when the credits are rolling.  It’s not the nauseous smell of popcorn that gets to me, nor the all-too-audible sucking of sodas, or even the punishable-by-death rustling of sweetie papers, especially by those who try to do so slowly, which only makes it worse (in the States, mind you, the sons-of-bitches carry tray-fulls of consumables in with them). It’s the fact that, as a parent of three young children, it’s difficult to get to the cinema without making all sorts of elaborate baby-sitting arrangements.  Since my wife doesn’t really like the movies that much, though she understands my addiction, I’ve started to go on my own, late at night, when there’s no-one else around. You know the old git you always see, the one who sits by himself, in a grubby raincoat, with telescope-strength, wire-rimmed glasses and a bag of mint imperials?  I am that man!

Sorry as my cinematic situation undoubtedly is, I have to confess that, after long and careful consideration, there is nothing but nothing in my personal pantheon of shopping unpleasantness to touch a car rental ‘incident’, or rather a series of rental-related incidents, that took place when I was in the United States last year.  In the course of my on-going and seemingly unending retailing hallucinations, I have often been annoyed, I have many times been moved to mutter sotto and not-so-sotto voce obscenities, I have actually gone eye-popping, purple-faced, jowls-quivering ballistic on occasion. But, with the exception of my hire-car farrago, I have never felt moved to sob uncontrollably, never felt it necessary to take a seat lest I swoon, never felt the need for an anguished howl of the I-want-my-mummy-where’s-the-womb-when-you-need-it variety.

However, it happened in Utah.  It happened in Salt Lake City.  It happened to me.  I still bear the scars.  So much so, that I can’t bring myself to tell you about it.  It’s too painful.  Too fresh.  Too tender. Too awful for words.  Perhaps later when I’ve come to terms with the trauma.  Let’s wait and see.

Instead, let me refer briefly to the psychopathology of flying, which is a veritable jetway of tears, sorrow and perpetual pain.  First up there’s the horrors of checking-in, where one is strapped into a shuffling queue of sweaty fellow aeronauts, all of whom are bandoleered in excess baggage or laden with a couple of decrepit relatives, while the sole check-in clerk on duty takes forever to process each economy-class passenger, the frequent-flier fuckers in first class slither vexatiously past and the only flight outta here’s about to take off.  If Grüppenführer Freddy Nietzsche were alive today and forced to mingle with the airline herd, he wouldn’t be philosophising with his hammer, take it from me.⁴ 

Then there’s the stomach-churning anxiety of the flight itself, where the ever-present possibilities of pilot error, metal fatigue, high octane immolation and Powerpoint precipitated death dives, pale by comparison with sitting next to the flatulent 22-stoner, finding a sliver of space in the overstuffed overhead lockers, getting stuck with cold coffee or a best-of-British-beef burrito, and coping with the queue of aisle-hogging cataleptics who are congenitally incapable of deplaning expeditiously.  Christ only knows what would happen in a real emergency (like when they run out of Diet Coke).⁵

To top it all, and just when you are at the very end of your air travel tether, there’s the baggage claim bummer, the carousel ordeal, the hold-all hold-up.  To my admittedly tiny mind, there are few things more agonising than waiting for one’s suitcase to be excreted from the baggage-handling bowels of the terminal building. Notwithstanding bar-coded labels and can’t-go-astray assurances, the whole thing is akin to a grotesque inversion of the National Lottery, where we wait nervously for our number to come up, to see the bag again.  Will it?  Won’t it?  Who cares what state it’s in? Unless it’s in another State, of course.  Every emerging suitcase is eyed expectantly in the hope that this is the one. 

Perhaps someone else has taken it, you can’t be too careful these days… 

But as the assembly swiftly disperses, after the momentary miracle of take up thy bag and walk, there’s still no sign of the offending article. There’s nothing on the carousel but that ubiquitous cardboard box no-one seems to want.⁶ A personal hygiene implosion is imminent, inevitable, inescapable.  No toothpaste, no shaving kit, no deodorant, no change of clothes.  Halitosis here were come.  Five o’clock shadow is sexy, they say.  I stink therefore I am.  Day old clothes are kinda clammy to start, but you get used to them after a while.  Pity about the socks.  Pity about the underpants.  Pity about the beef burrito stains on the T-shirt.  Wonder how the interview will go?  Wonder if my suitcase will catch up before my onward journey?  Wonder if it’ll follow me round the world, like a BO bloodhound, a stalker suitcase, a heavy-breathing hold-all, a Hitchcockian haversack, a Carry On carry-on, constantly seeking but never quite making contact, a mirror image of the Lacanian lack.  I wonder, I wander, I want to go home.

Having bared my shopping soul, having laid my airline neuroses on the line, having placed my consumer cojones in the proverbial blender, I suppose some of the more unscrupulous among you will take advantage of my vulnerability to point out that going to the cinema or hanging around baggage claim areas does not constitute shopping.  Service encounters, possibly, but shopping surely not.  They lie outside the domain of retailing, of what is conventionally taken to comprise ‘shopping’, and hence must be excised from this text.  Forthwith.  Forcibly if need be.  Better luck next time, Stephen.  Call yourself a Professor of Retailing?  Don’t call us…’cos we’ve got a caller identification facility and we’ll refuse to take it.  Get it? Got it?  Good!  Come to think of it, what’s a so-called Professor of Retailing doing criticising shopping?  You hate shopping, do you?  Surely, you’re supposed to beat the retailing drum, to help retailers better run their stores, to expound on the unbounded joys of shopping, spending and consumption, especially to excess.  Aren’t you?

What can I say in the face of such unwarranted antipathy?, other than that academic life can be so cruel; that it is filled with pedants and hair-splitters; that I really need a word or two of kindness right now, not a kick in the unmentionables.  Still, in my defence, I would draw your attention to the fact that the boundary between shopping and non-shopping is not clear-cut.  I sometimes do a little exercise with my first-year undergraduates, where I ask them to identify the limits of retailing, both ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’.  Are banks retailers?  Estate agents?  Insurance companies?  Airlines?  Factory outlets?  And, the answer is that there is no answer, or at least not a definitive one.  Yes, there are any number of ‘standard’, ‘official’ or ‘government’ definitions of retailing and non-retailing, but these are constantly changing and vary from country to country and time to time.  Needless to say, this renders comparative analysis difficult for all those earnest academics who like nice, neat definitions of department stores, hypermarkets and what have you, so that they can count them up and send us to sleep with their findings (every cloud, as they say…).  Indeed, in an earlier role as a ‘respectable’ member of the academic retailing community - not a particularly convincing performance, admittedly, though I pretended pretty hard - I actually wrote a couple of ‘learned’ papers on this very subject.  Fear not, I’ll spare you the gory details.⁷ 

Anyway, the bottom line on this thorny topic is that, as a distinguished Professor of Retailing (ahem), I think I can confidently speak with some authority on the precise status of cinema going and airline lines.  They’re shopping if I say they’re shopping!  Okay buster?  And while we’re on the subject, I’ll have you know that I don’t consider it my job to extol the sybaritic pleasures of shopping (it’s not pleasurable, so why pretend otherwise?), or to make a case for the retailing industry (they are more than capable of doing so themselves and retailers have never been slow to bang the self-serving drum), or even to help them better run their businesses (frankly, if any of them are foolish enough to take my advice, or that of any other academic ‘authority’, then they deserve to be on the slippery slope to a last-few-days, everything-must-go, all-reasonable-offers-considered, fixtures-and-fittings-included liquidation sale).  In truth, I have yet to come across a retailing academic who actually likes going shopping.  As postmodern commentator, Linda Hutcheon rightly reminds us, adamant rejection and passionate curiosity often go hand-in-hand (sorry about that, readers, I just thought I’d slip in a bit of scholarship while you weren’t looking).⁸

Most significantly perhaps, there are certain types of shopping that I really quite enjoy, albeit I don’t consider them to be ‘shopping’ as such.  Knowing you knowing me, you probably think I’m referring to some kind of hyperreal, postmodern simulacrum of shopping.  After all, in my less guarded moments - and it’s not like me to write in an unguarded academic fashion, as you may have gathered - I have been known to valorise such sites of plurivalent, polyvocal, decentred, heteroglossian, carnivalesque (insert your preferred postmodern modifier here, folks) jouissance.  It pains me to confess, furthermore, that I have actually visited every Disney theme park on the planet, the Californian ‘original’ - pardon? - on two very different occasions.  One in a torrential thunderstorm (you haven’t lived until you’ve aquaplaned down Main Street USA) and the other with three screaming kids in tow. 

But the truth is, I detest such places.  Not only are they monuments to the wonders of polystyrene, not only are they eerily clean and intolerably cheery, not only do they pick your pocket on entry and at every point of their noxious compass, not only do you spend longer, much longer, in line than on the abbreviated rides (pace Baudrillard, the queues in Disneyland are real in order to create the impression that the rest of the park is fake)⁹ but their realer-than-real hyperreal experience is no longer hyperreal enough, I’m sorry to say. 

Granted, not long after my most recent visit to Disneyland, I repaired to the ‘world-famous’ San Diego Zoo and, confronted with recumbent rhinos, lazy lemurs, hesitant hippos, enervated elephants, indisposed iguanas and sheepish goats - not to mention queuing for 45 minutes to catch a glimpse of the grimy posterior of a giant panda which had clearly come back from the taxidermists that very morning - you kinda wish they’d shove some sort of animatronic device up their obdurate asses…mules, bears, antelopes, chimpanzees, zebras.  The guy at the hot-dog stand could do with one too, as could his hot-dogs.

Nevertheless, with the possible exception of  Universal City, where the cheesy backlot tour of the ‘working’ studios generates a momentary postmodern frisson of real fake?, fake real?, fake real fake?, real fake real?, such experiences are disconcertingly disappointing, even for post-tourist, post-shopper, post-marketing, post-prandial posteriors like ourselves.  I shall account for this  post-everything phenomenon in due course, but it doesn’t make the real hyperreal experience any less unfulfilling. Some corn-feds may be impressed by the hyper-efficiency of these deconsecration camps but they scare the shit outta me.

So Stephen, I hear you say, if it’s not theme parks you have a shopping soft spot for, what can it possibly be?  Surely it can’t be one of the many forms of non-shop shopping - mail order catalogues, shopping channels or the Internet?  Correct.  It isn’t.  Although mail order catalogues undoubtedly perform a useful therapeutic function for tumescent teenagers and onanists of all ages, they do absolutely nothing for me. Well, almost nothing.  I hardly look at them at all.  It’s not my fault if I’m on dozens of their mailing lists and they keep sending me the things!  I’ll really have to write to the management of Victoria’s Secret if this keeps up (if I can still hold a pen, if I can still write, if I can still find my way to a mailbox).

Similarly, the proletarian connotations of the roof-mounted satellite dish -- the cloth cap of post-industrial society, as Gilbert Adair once observed¹⁰ -- are sufficient to ensure that I have never been exposed to the temptations of shopping channels.  Television, I’m sure you agree, is a profoundly sacred space, where worshipers abase themselves before King of the Hill, Beavis and Butthead, The X-Files, Noel’s House Party, Emmerdale and The Simpsons.  Hence, it must not be contaminated by crass commercial considerations.  Like most tele-fundamentalists reared in God-fearing, cleanliness-is-next-to-Elliott-Ness, washed-in-the-blood-of-the-Lambchop, Little-House-on-the-Prairiesque households, I only ever watch television on Sundays, during holy days of obligation and, naturally, for Lent.  My viewing is confined to terrestrial channels only, might I add, since cable and satellite are demonstrably the spawn of the Devil (I mean, how else can we account for MTV?)

When it comes to the Internet, moreover, the sum total of my knowledge could be hand-written on the back of a silicon chip and there’d still be room for The Ten Commandments, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the complete Oxford English Dictionary.  I am the Candide of cyberspace, the man who put the IT into Luddite, the wind into Windows, the con into icon.  I don’t so much surf the net as paddle around in rolled-up trousers with knotted handkerchief atop sun-burnt pate.¹¹ When they make Microsoft the Movie rest assured I won’t be reading for a leading role.  You typin’ to me?  Made it, ma, laptop of the world.  I’m ready for my clip-art, Mr. De Mille. You can’t Intel the truth!  Get the picture?

Oh well, I suppose I’ve avoided the issue long enough and I really ought to put you out of your misery.  You are feeling miserable, aren’t you?  Perfect!  Okay then, since you demand closure, I reckon that if I were forced to choose between going shopping or having the soles of my feet repeatedly beaten with baseball bats - a close run thing though it is - I could be persuaded to spend some time in a bookshop, or two, or three, or more.  To be perfectly frank, I’m an inveterate, a hopeless, an addicted book buyer.  Mainly my own, of course, ’cos someone has to keep the sales figures up, but if they aren’t available (and they usually aren’t as my publisher likes to make it difficult for would-be purchasers), I’ll buy anything with an unbroken spine and pristine pages which temporarily, tantalisingly stick together thanks to some kind of thaumaturgic static charge or mystical printer’s impress. 

I feel much the same way in record stores, where the release of a new CD by my favourite artists - John Hiatt, Richard Thompson, Aerosmith, Def Leppard, Tom Petty et al - induces an almost uncontrollable urge to get it, to have it, to hold it, even though the passion passes at the moment of possession and I only actually listen to (or read) a fraction of what I actually acquire.  In fact, it’s got so bad I truly believe that if I don’t purchase the CD or book when I find it on display, I’ll never see it again.  The moment, the mood, the magic will disappear and cannot be recaptured.  Thus, even my few miserable moments of shopping pleasure - not that buying books or CDs counts as ‘shopping’, you understand, since the former is work-related and the latter a basic human need - are drenched in displeasure, dripping with distaste, drowned in distress.

I kid you not. 

Take, for instance, the time I thought I was in bibliophile Heaven, when I reckoned I really had it made, when for once in my life the Gods of good luck and financial largesse finally smiled upon me.  I was browsing in a children’s bookstore, looking for a birthday present for a precocious three-year-old (according to its parents, you understand).  Whilst groping the glistening texts, I found myself captivated by a slim volume, which recounted the life, times and haute cuisine adventures of a chocolate chip cookie. A biscuit Bildungsroman, no less.  This gastronomic epic commenced and concluded with those blood-curdling words that strike fear into the healthy-eating hearts of first-time parents,  “I want a cookie!” (albeit after a couple more of the brats they’ll give them anything to shut the fuck up).

Ever eager to worm my way into sales assistants’ affections – hey, it could be worth 10% discount – I mentioned in my winning Irish way that this text was obviously a pre-teen Finnegans Wake, that its author was the James Joyce of the tiny tot market.  She immediately informed me that they had one of his books in stock, specifically a first edition of the little-known Joycean masterwork, Dinosaur Bob.  Recognising a potentially lucrative literary sensation (James Joyce’s secret career in best-selling baby-books – about dinosaurs!),  I immediately asked to see the sacred text… 

Unfortunately, it was by one William Joyce; possibly a descendant, undoubtedly a worthy scribe, assuredly enjoying every hard-earned dollar of his Dinosaur Bob royalties, plus a healthy cut of the tie-in merchandise. But my monumental bibliographic discovery, my passport to literary fame and fortune, my one and only lucky break, evaporated on the spot. 

I want a cookie!

There is, however, a single, noteworthy exception to the never-ending awfulness of my excruciating mercantile experiences.  One exception and one exception only.  I’m referring, of course, to Christmas.  God, I adore Christmas shopping.  Love it, love it, love it. Love it to death. Not, of course, for the hustle and bustle, the excited faces of eager children and intoxicated adults, or the merry jingle of sleigh bells and cash registers.  Nor indeed for the thought of the pleasure that my carefully chosen, incredibly expensive, impossibly perfect presents will bring to my loved ones. (What’s wrong with gift-wrapped copies of my own books?  I signed them, didn’t I!)  Nor, even, for the deeply moving spectacle of such an important occasion on the religious calendar, where extended families gather together in joyous disharmony, in order to celebrate the fact that Christmas comes but once a year, thank the Lord. 

No, folks, the reason I love Christmas shopping is because it gives me a chance to push, shove, trip, kick, punch, gouge, bite, elbow or be inexcusably rude to all the other shoppers, shop assistants, service personnel and people generally that I try to tolerate throughout the rest of the year.  I love the season of peace and goodwill.  I love driving into town at first light, doing all my carefully pre-planned shopping in a rapid burst, and driving out again as the rest of the pathetic bastards are just getting started. 

I love the smell of nativity in the morning.

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