The Mysterious Art of Shopping

This area is, of course, naturally the province of ladies of a certain type and most men run away screaming at the prospect of several hours of such consumer activities. While I accept this as a given, I've never really understood the (generally) male antipathy towards shopping.

The typical cry of 'but how can you spend an entire day shopping?' is bewildering to me. Where, precisely, is the difficulty? Now I believe that the problem is that many people (and I include women here) do not know how to shop pleasurably. It is an art and I am an artist par excellence. To prove this I recently took a male friend - who previously hated shopping - on a spree and found a firm convert to this most dynamic of art-forms.

The trick for fun communal shopping is to have a rough sort of game-plan in mind. This willy-nilly drifting in and out of shops with no objective in mind only leads to frustration and ennui. However, one should be careful not to go too far in the opposite direction and have so rigid a plan in mind that disappointment is unavoidable and subsequent murderous rage inevitable.

Firstly, no one likes to do the same thing, non-stop, all day. The day should be punctuated with coffee stops, lunch in relaxing surroundings (not Pret a Manger) and mid-afternoon cocktails. Inbetween times should be an assortment of different types of shopping - some clothes shopping, some gadgetry excitement (I once spent a giggly 10 mins chasing my friend on those electric scooter thingies in Selfridges), a mooch around a good bookstore, snaffling freebies in a food hall and of course shoe shopping.

My fame has grown to the point that I am now booked as the shopping companion of choice. In fact this Saturday I'm off jaunting with one friend, and after much persuasion I'm commissioned for Sunday too (but she has to buy me lunch).

One last piece of advice:

Avoid Oxford Street on Saturday like the plague. There is no need to put yourself through that.