Go on, treat yourself at the sales

The sales are on. You will have seen the images on television, of people standing all night by Burberry, or lying outside Gucci in a sleeping bag, waiting for the opportunity to buy a shoe. It looks like the end, or perhaps the beginning, of a war. It is a feeding frenzy, where the shoppers eat not cows, but leather goods. We have evolved a bit. I am not talking about the queues outside Next, which are beyond analysis. Nor am I talking about electrical goods, because I don't believe that buying a new washing machine is an act of delusion so significant that it needs to be separated into its constituent parts. It is the designer goods sales that obsess me, because the objects are hideous and the desire to possess them is accelerating. You used to be able to shop in the first week of January for your plunder, but these days the shelves are empty by 27 December. And yet the personal debt of the citizens of Britain rises and rises, like a Dior receipt buffeting in the wind. It is now, on average, £9,731, excluding mortgages, or, if you prefer, 14.62 Mulberry Alexa Hobo Plum Loopy Leopard Quilted Denim handbags. For your money you get a stupid name, with a lick of irony thrown in. Hobo means vagrant, don't ya know? Ha! I go to the sales every year and I am always surprised by how pointless the goods are, although I shouldn't be, because I suck down the advertising like everyone else. I would not mind buying, in that old wife's cliche, something of good quality that lasts for ever – a gravestone perhaps? But that is not the point of this junk. It is sort of fashion anti-matter – clothes that do not warm, shoes you cannot walk in, and handbags too heavy to carry. Selfridges, for instance, is stocking a high-heeled trainer. I forget the price, but this object is utterly useless, and it happily screams its uselessness, as if the design house marketing monkeys are laughing at us, which they probably are. If I could persuade a consumer to sleep outside my shop in a sleeping bag, so they could buy a £665 handbag named after a penniless vagrant (down from £950!), I would laugh too. The shops, of course, claim that advertising is neutral. If that is so, why do they spend so much money on it? To make the Mulberry Alexa Hobo Plum Loopy Leopard Quilted Denim handbag feel good about itself? So why do the shoppers queue like refugees in need of leather goods? I do try to ask, but asking sales shoppers why they are shopping is like asking alcoholics why they drink. Incapable of evaluating their own behaviour, they reply only in babble: "I want to treat myself." They are temporarily deranged, and their testimony is not to be trusted.