You pays your money ...

Alexander Chancellor
Saturday December 24, 2005
The Guardian

  It's Christmas Eve, and I'm completely ready. I thought I wasn't going to be. Last month I went to Harrods to start my Christmas shopping, but found the place so tacky, crowded and depressing that I couldn't bring myself to buy anything. The last straw was the memorial book for Diana and Dodi still waiting at the top of an escalator for customers to sign. Will Mohamed Al Fayed never allow closure?
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After that experience, I couldn't face another department store and didn't know what I was going to do about Christmas until I suddenly remembered the internet. Of course! That was the answer. One could buy everything now on the internet and have it delivered to one's home without ever stepping out of doors. No congestion charge. No parking fines. Bliss.   So that's what I did. I bought all my Christmas presents on the internet, and when I wake up tomorrow morning I will be much better prepared to face the day than I ever have been before. There will be neatly labelled parcels for everyone and no need for guilty explanations of my failure to produce enough presents to go round. It will, however, have been an unusually expensive Christmas. There is something to be said for shopping as it used to be before the internet took over. The queues, the jostling, the effort of carrying heavy shopping bags on the underground: these were all disincentives to spend. But on the internet spending
 is absurdly easy.   The system is also staggeringly efficient. I ordered a whole lot of useless things from a German website a couple of weeks ago, and two days later a truck drew up outside my house in Northamptonshire and deposited them all on my doorstep. It was a miracle. Such is my blind faith in the system that I even ordered a turkey over the internet in the certainty that it would be delivered, as promised, on December 23 (even though I knew that, if it wasn't, there would be nothing for anybody to eat on Christmas Day).   I mustn't reveal what presents I have bought in case any of the recipients should read this before Christmas and feel a surge of disappointment before they have even opened their parcels. Suffice it to say that all of them are things that everyone could happily do without, and that most of them serve no purpose at all. Those presents that might just be described as useful are all of them cooking utensils, for when I asked members of my family if there was
 anything they specially wanted, all that any of them said was "something for the kitchen".   I wonder why this is so. Is it because we have all been brainwashed by the celebrity chefs and television pundits into believing that cookery is the only thing left in the world that matters? Or is it because people who already have everything still feel they can always do with a new saucepan or frying pan?   Anyway, as I say, I am all geared up and ready for the great day, which I may well spend puzzling over why I have been driven to spend such an enormous amount of money on things that nobody either needs or wants.
















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