"It is this mass of unclean world that we have superimposed on the clean world that we cannot bear. ... all these little amorphous houses like an eruption, a disease on the clean earth; and all of them full of such a diseased spirit, every landlady harping on her money, her furniture, every visitor harping on his latitude of escape from money and furniture. The whole thing like an active disease, fighting out the health. One watches them on the sea-shore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. ... " (D.H. Lawrence - from a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 1915)

... turning these sentences over in my mind as I sat waiting for L. in the Camberley shopping centre & - the next day - drifting around M&S at The Meadows. The radio, too, is in on the act with each news bulletin predicting Sales fever or reporting 'footfall' across the land (how strange that such a poeticism is now part of the jargon of marketing). The pressure these days is not even subliminal. And what, after all, are we buying - or, perhaps it is more accurate to say - buying into?

Is there anything else I can get you?

That tone of voice. That dissimulation. Helpfulness masking coercion.

Go on - you deserve it.