There are people I know - some of them extremely well - who just love going shopping. When an opportunity to shop presents itself, as it seems to more or less regularly, they express themselves full of joyful anticipation and of an impatience to hit town, with plastic on board and at the ready. Readers, I do not understand this mind-set. I will go further and say that it mystifies me.
Yesterday afternoon, with a personal event upcoming which required the purchase of certain gifts - I will not specify of what sort, since that consideration is immaterial, unlike the gifts themselves - I was called upon to submit myself to the demands made upon an ordinary consciousness by the contemporary shopping environment. I will leave aside the fact that my body is always overcome by a draining fatigue the instant I arrive in this environment - a physiological phenomenon I have never been able to comprehend. And I will leave aside the puzzle that, on entering a large department store, the intending purchaser never arrives at the part of the store he (for he it is in this case) needs or wants; there are always floors to negotiate, by lift, stair or escalator, and then vast spaces to cross, as if shopping doubled as a training ground for long hiking expeditions. And I leave aside, too, that the air in such places is like a condensed falsehood all of itself. These obstacles and inconveniences I now know, in the light of much experience, I must expect.
But on top of them, there is the fact that a certain type of shopping milieu no longer bears any resemblance to the space that a man of my years used to know as a shop - allowing quiet, calm deliberation and the helpful advice of knowledgeable others. No, some of these places give the impression of being not so much outlets for sale and purchase, but rather the throbbing, pulsating, venues for sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. I am all in favour of sex and am of the generation by whom rock 'n roll was first enthusiastically received. (I will say nothing here about drugs.) The general atmosphere, however, of noisy and gregarious hanging out, with the putative shoppers indistinguishable from the salespeople and the shopping space all of a lump, forbidding any privacy of consultation... well, you will have got my drift by now: these are not conducive to clear thought and rational decision-making. Of course, it is possible also to find establishments more suitable to the task at hand, but that again becomes part of the ordeal: finding them. The whole thing doesn't bear thinking about. And it doesn't bear doing more often than one absolutely has to.