How I miss the simple pleasure of browsing a sumptuous shop
If you go down to the shops today, among the exotic sights of our newly restored freedom, you might spot the elegant figure of the government adviser, Dame Helena Morrissey, who recently announced her intention to celebrate the reopening of the high street by nipping to M&S for some undies. For now, I am resisting the temptation to join Lady Morrissey among the balcony bras and matching Brazilian knickers. The back-to-back sales of lockdown mean that I have accumulated enough stuff to last until the end of time.
While the shops were shut I resorted, reluctantly, to online shopping, with all its maddening faff. Yet now I find myself unexpectedly resistant to the allure of the newly reopened nonessential shops. Partly this is a symptom of a peculiar nervousness that I suddenly feel about things I used to do without a second thought: driving, taking a train to another city. But it is also a fear of what I will find when I venture back onto the high street.
“The impact of Covid-19 has rewired the customer journey,” a retail guru recently remarked. When it comes to the transactional business of exchanging cash for goods, the rewiring of my customer journey is no more than a mild irritation. But that, for me, was never the point of shopping. What I loved was browsing; and if the high street is endangered, so too is browsing as I once cherished it.
The relationship between shopping and browsing is the same as that between walking to a destination and sauntering. The former is brisk, purposeful, utilitarian. The latter – apparently aimless – is, as Charles Saint-beuve remarked of the French practice of flânerie, or strolling, “the very opposite of doing nothing”. To browse is to allow the mind to drift, with no particular object in mind, but with an underlying alertness to the myriad surrounding possibilities.
Browsing was a pleasure I learnt early: trailing my mother around the shop floors of Hulbards of Canterbury; captivated by the heady glamour of these provincial stores: the pungent scents, the glitter of costume jewellery, the daring possibilities of skirt length – vertiginous to voluminous – in Ladies’ Fashions, the sophistication of fizzy lemonade with a scoop of ice-cream in the café.
No one has ever written better about the seductions of browsing than Emile Zola, in his novel set in an imaginary Parisian department store, Au Bonheur des Dames. The textures of poplin and gauze, the shimmer of silk and velvet, the animal scent of suede gloves … Compared with such an intoxicating assault on the senses, the online monoculture of scrolling through screens full of images seems insipid.
What I have missed most in lockdown is not wandering the great Oxford Street temples of desire, but the humbler charms of John Lewis At Home stores, where tidy rows of coat-hangers, anti-moth sachets and laundry baskets exhale a reassuring sense of order in a chaotic world. Alas, my local branch is among those that will not reopen today.
The tragedy of Zola’s novel, in which small family shops are relentlessly obliterated by a vast commercial behemoth, is being re-enacted in a 21st-century version.
“His creation was introducing a new religion,” reflects the owner of Au Bonheur des Dames. But now that “religion” is being supplanted in its turn by a new set of retail observances. And I am not – yet – a convert.
READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion