Jingle Hell

Even the most enthusiastic yuletide participant gets pushed to their limit on Oxford Street.

Crunch. The Primark bag waits all of 20 seconds to split open, releasing pants, jumpers and scented candles out onto the soggy concrete slabs of Oxford Street. My yelps of panic are ignored by the stampede, blindly marching in and out of the store like ants building a giant nest of sparkly dresses and synthetic knits.

This isn’t just any pay-cheque-spending Saturday; we are now in the run-up to Christmas. I know this because my waxy candles are twinkling under the present-shaped fairy lights, and everyone’s blank expressions now contain a glint of desperation.

The higher-end stores, if not quite as manic as Marble Arch’s cut-price castle, are just as scary during this festive time. No trip to London’s shopping mecca can safely be administered without an extra-pointy umbrella, stomping shoes and an iPod cranked up to full volume.

This is where we, the consumerist massive, spend away our sorrows in one foul swoop after 5:30pm, or systematically trawl through every cashmere vendor until the perfect gift for Auntie Sue is successfully extracted.

The second activity is the more dangerous of the two, as these West End patrons are not just on a deadly mission to get what they want; they are doing it begrudgingly. No one wants to spend time in shops that they don’t understand, or, more importantly, shops that don’t understand them.

In electronic shops or sports stores, for instance, women seem to attract condescending prattlers with name badges claiming they can do them amazing deals. Men get horribly flustered in any establishment that sells fluffy, lacy or soapy-smelling things. Older people hate delving through racks of overproduced CDs, laid out, irritatingly, by genres rather than alphabetically. And the younger generation don’t want to be wasting their youth in the M&S queue.

Now that a forgettable celebrity has kindly switched those gaudy Crimbo lights on, the whole Oxford Circus area is a No-Go Zone for me. With the world’s best shopping opportunities at my fingertips, I prefer to save my fingernails and my emotional disposition by sourcing everything online. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus on loop while I negotiate the ‘aftershave for dads’ section alongside a gaggle of frantic kids? No thanks. The post guy now discreetly brings my packages to my desk at work. Shame I can’t visit the relatives online too. (Only joking, Auntie Sue.)

Image by Cristiano Betta courtesy of Flickr