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My problem is I’m a slow reader. I’m a 19th-century shopper trapped in the future, constantly in danger of being mown down by other pedestrians as I dither outside a branch of Shelly’s shoestore wondering if I’m too old for leopardskin shoes. Inside shops it’s even worse, with assistants insisting on trying to assist, when it is immediately obvious that there’s nothing I would remotely be seen dead in that I actually need or can raise the necessary finance for. Even if I spot something vaguely not too horrible it loses its charm the minute I see it in proximity to the rest of my clothes. No wonder men are flocking to mail order, which gives you the opportunity to buy something that doesn’t suit you on the grounds that it at least suits the man in the picture. Tim, whom I bump into on the school run, doesn’t go ‘shopping’, he goes ‘buying’. ‘If I decide I need a pale-blue button-down shirt for work,’ he says, ‘I go in a shop and buy one. I refuse to be distracted by anything else.’ ‘But what if they don’t have one?’ ‘Then I don’t buy one.’ ‘What - not even, say, a darker blue?’ He shakes his head. ‘Sorry. Thin end of the wedge.’ My wife’s friend Lorna tells me about her ex-husband, who would never go shopping for clothes. ‘He just used to wear his old ones until they were worn out,’ she says. ‘So I’d have to go out and buy replacements — it was either that or be married to a scarecrow. I did take him once into a branch of Marks & Spencers to buy his father a sweater but he said he was having a panic attack and had to go and wait outside. Needless to say, he never bought me any presents. But the minute we were going through the divorce he turned up one day in a new jacket and trousers! I think he must have discovered retail therapy, but it took a life crisis to do it.’ You have to have some sympathy for the poor man. I get disoriented, too, wandering round department stores, which are like being stuck in a country where all the road signs are in a different alphabet and everybody knows the word for soft furnishings except you. The worst has to be the department store Selfridges, where glossy young women come up and spray perfume at you every 10 minutes and expect you to be delighted, even though you only came in to use the toilets on bonfire night and have been trying to get out again ever since. As for present-buying, I have discovered an excellent website called menhateshopping.com, which is devoted to listing places that sell gift vouchers online - surely the ideal convenience for people who don’t want to buy anything and don’t want to have to go in a shop to do it. Gift vouchers should come with a little greetings card saying: ‘Have you any idea what a nuisance this is?’ You can’t risk a gift voucher with someone you’re supposed to like. Next week I will spend the whole day trawling round the best shopping districts in London for my wife’s present before buying something in desperation from a convenient niche shop for socks or underwear at the train station on the way home. You can’t win. Because even when you try, fate will always step in and make it look as though you’ve spent the afternoon in the pub. The Internet is full of subversive anti-shopping material. My favourite is Top 30 Hints for Men Who Hate Shopping. Examples include: ‘Take shopping carts for the express purpose of filling them and stranding them at strategic locations around the store’ and ‘Drag an armchair on display over to the magazines and relax with a cooling drink from the food court’. Another site suggests the reason men hate Richard Gere is because he shows almost as much interest in shopping in his films as he does in appearing nude. And it can’t be good for us. In a survey of London shoppers in The Soul of the New Consumer (Nicholas Brealey) psychologist David Lewis reports: ‘In some cases, when we looked at heart rate and blood pressure, (we found readings) that you’d expect to see in a fighter pilot going into combat.’ All men in the survey showed signs of stress, compared to only one in four women. So what’s our problem? ‘Impatience, intolerance of crowds, queuing,’ says Lewis, when I ring him. ‘And men don’t like the pressure of time. That’s why they hate going out shopping with women. Women are methodical, comparing prices and quality from store to store, trying to make an informed purchase. Men on their own go crashing in like SWAT teams, grab the first thing they see and run out again. They’re all right shopping for computers and cars and gadgets but on the whole they’d rather be somewhere else.’ Like the dentist’s
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So, no, we don’t mind going to the supermarket, as long as we don’t
get earache for being spontaneous and taking all week about it. What we
do hate is having to shop for clothes, which involves abandoning the
relative safety of the one-stop shop and facing the tyranny of choice
that is the high street. In her recent book Carried Away: The Invention
of Modern Shopping (Faber), the academic Rachel Bowlby explains how the
civilised practice of ‘strolling’ and the detailed examination of
shop windows common in days of yore has given way to ‘high speed foot
traffic’. Crowds carry us along. We are hurrying to the office or the
gym. We have learnt to ‘read’ windows as we pass.