As I was saying, it’s not just the horror of traffic jams and not being able to find a parking space that makes me dread the prospect of Christmas shopping. It’s not even the thought that at some point I shall be obliged to join the bewildered throng of shoppers in the West End, hemmed in by metal crash barriers as though we were engaging in civil disobedience instead of looking for a tub of bath salts for Grandma, and chivvied at every junction by bawling bossybootses with megaphones and fluorescent tabards. No, the thing I’m really not looking forward to is the bruising personal contact with shop assistants that is the inevitable side effect of Christmas shopping.

My son is, unusually for a bloke (though perhaps inevitably for a bloke who lives with me), quite keen on shopping. That is, he is keen on the notion of going somewhere with money in his pocket and mooching about in search of T-shirts, computer games, CDs, supplies of an unwholesome comestible called Toxic Waste and other essential trappings of adolescent life. What he doesn’t much care for, however, is going shopping with me. He says the experience is like the description of grandmothers in Willans and Searle’s How to be Topp: “One chiz about gran is that she hound and persekute all shopkeepers. She take you along and you hav to listen while she send for the manager. She sa i have dealt here for 30 years why can you not deliver on tuesdays ect while i try to pretend i am not there . . .”

I have to admit that this is a faithful description of my own behaviour in shops, particularly when we have gone out in search of something essential but dreary and unaccountably elusive — school vests, for example, or rugby socks, or an ironing-board cover. In mitigation, I should like to plead that if I regularly carry on like Nigel Molesworth’s granny in supermarkets and department stores, it is because I am driven to it by the staff, most of whom seem to have adopted as their maxim when dealing with customers a paraphrase of Hazlitt’s famous line: There is nothing good to be had in the shops, or if there is, they will not let you have it. What’s more, I know it isn’t just me, because a report has appeared — called, inevitably, Are You Being Served? — which says that sales assistants are ruder, more ignorant and less helpful than they were ten years ago. That’s always supposing you can find one, which — as anyone knows who has ever roamed the desolate aisles of John Lewis’s electrical department in the forlorn hope of catching the eye of one of those sharp-suited young salesmen with little hedgehog spikes of gelled hair — you can’t.

Things are better in the North, apparently, where some of the survey’s 1,775 mystery shoppers found that the sales staff made more eye contact, smiled more, were more friendly and helpful than their colleagues in the South, where the customer tends to be regarded not as a fellow human being with whom one might engage in a mutually beneficial transaction, but as a tiresome interruption to the essential business of hurrying about with a clipboard.

For someone as fond of shopping as I am, a move to the North begins to look like an attractive prospect — if only the son would permit it, which he won’t, unreconstructed Londoner and West Ham fan that he is. The alternative, I suppose, is to do my Christmas shopping in France, where, despite the supposed rudeness of the French, each commercial encounter begins with an exchange of greetings — an acknowledgment of the common humanity of shop assistant and shopper that has become rare in over-stressed, shopped-out Britain.

Limbo has more allure than Heaven

I know I’m not going to Heaven, because of my behaviour in shops, if nothing else. Purgatory will be my lot, I suppose, if I’m lucky. But I am still sorry to see that the Roman Catholic Church has gone off the idea of Limbo, which has been part of Catholic teaching since the 13th century. According to Dante, the particular Limbo that Pope Benedict described (in 1984, when he was still a Cardinal) as “a theological hypothesis” contains not only the souls of unbaptised babies but also those of virtuous pagans. In many ways, a realm populated by Homer, Horace, Ovid and their chums, plus a throng of cheerful infants, sounds a good deal more attractive than Heaven, which I always thought must be like the worst sort of cocktail party— full of glittery celebs and no one you quite dare talk to.

Dictates of fame

The French this week are marking the retirement of a very particular glittery celeb. Bernard Pivot, a 70-year-old Gallic cross between, I suppose, Melvyn Bragg, Jeremy Paxman and the late Richard Whiteley, has finally stepped down from a 32-year career in charge of a telly show, Les Dicos d’Or, whose popularity among French viewers was rivalled only by the coverage of the Cannes Film Festival. It wasn’t the most strikingly televisual show that you can imagine, consisting as it did of M Pivot giving difficult dictations to clever people. M Pivot himself marvelled at its success: saying: “What could be less likely to work on television than a group of people putting their heads down to write and not saying anything?” But the competition heats attracted hundreds of thousands of contestants annually. As Laurence Sterne once remarked, the French “are a loyal, a gallant, a generous, an ingenious and good-temper ’d people . . . if they have a fault, they are too serious”. Which is apparently a conclusion also arrived at by French TV executives. At any rate, they seem to be dropping the format. A golden opportunity, I’d say, for Paxo to branch out.

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