I hate shopping

I hate shopping with a passion. Or, to be precise, I hate shopping when everybody else decides to go shopping at the same time. I do not mind running out and blowing my hard earned cash on CDs, clothes and stuff, but not when I have to deal with other people to do it.

The worst time of the year to go shopping is after Christmas - the so-called January sales - for this is when everybody, but everybody and their uncle Charlie decides to go out and look for 'bargains'.

They come out of their holes clutching their savings or plastic cards and buy enough junk to get them through till the next round of 'seasonal' sales and disappear. Only an idiot would go out shopping on these days. And yet I went.

I was lured by an advert in this paper that promised me original CDs and DVDs for only Lm1 and I was hooked.

Although the offer was for Boxing Day and the day after, my psychic abilities told me that the stuff I wanted would be completely sold out by the first day, so there was only one day to go, and that was the most dreaded shopping day of the year.

So having been taught to always be prepared for eventualities, I laced up my combat boots, threw on the camouflage clothing, hooked on the grenades, honed my trusty SOG37 combat knife, holstered the MK 23, Heckler & Koch pistol and went shopping.

I hopped into the car and headed off towards Sliema. I had forgotten how bad traffic is on days like this. It's not so much the sheer numbers of cars on the road, it's the fact that everyone's intellect seems to drop down to the level of that of a brick when they get behind the wheel on days like this - not just any brick - a stupid, thick, dumb, brainless brick.

As I was jammed in the middle of an unmoving wall of plastic and metal that wasn't getting anywhere fast, watching the pretty traffic light change uselessly from green to orange to red and back again, I turned on the radio. Duhh!

I got that phone-in programme where the lady lawyer on the born- again station encourages her listeners to be the first to phone and win a meal for two worth Lm5 (taz-zejt!) at a Chinese restaurant in Valletta.

I changed the station and got some talking head with a pseudo- Canadian/American/Australian accent playing whatever it is that passes for pop music today. Yukk!

I changed again and got more of the same, only this time it was a guy called DJ Banana. Gahhh! I gave up on the radio and popped in a CD as the wall of cars began to inch forward sporadically.

Finally, I got to Sliema. Parking was impossible. While everybody else drove around in circles, I stalked a woman coming out of a shop right up to her car, literally nudging her bum with my bonnet, till I took her place. That place was mine! Mine, I tell you, mine!

I walked inside the shop and was totally unprepared for the smelly, rowdy horde of people waiting within, milling about like cattle waiting to be slaughtered. My jaw dropped and I uttered a popular four-letter word followed by a profanity as I stood inside the doorway.

A woman who was standing nearby looked at me in shock, or it could have been hope when she heard me utter the popular four-letter word, but hey, those are the hazards of shopping on Boxing Day. Sorry, lady. No sympathy there.

After pushing and shoving and cursing my way to the CD section, I was thrilled to see that they still had plenty of the stuff I wanted in stock, so I quickly picked up a couple of Miles Davis CDs I'd been looking for, an Aretha Franklin, a Sarah Brightman, and the latest CDs by Andrea Boccelli and Alessandro Safina, and then decided to browse around a bit.

Man, that was stupid of me. I don't know what I thought I was going to see. Every time I turned to look at something there was a person in the flaming way. If there's one thing I hate, it's having a flaming person in my flaming way, when I'm flaming trying to look at something.

This is why I hate shopping when other people are about. Normally, I save my shopping for off-peak hours where I will only have to deal with the bare minimum of morons and half-wits pulling things off the shelves as if there were no tomorrow. But not on Boxing Day, baby. Oh no! Not on your nelly!

I quickly gave up the idea of browsing and got into one of the mammoth lines at the cash desk. I stood in the back of the line. I looked at my watch. I looked around. I looked at the person in front of me. I leered at the blonde next to me.

The line did not move. I leered again, this time lasciviously. There was no reaction from either the blonde, or the line, so I looked at the ceiling and the ceiling lights and back at the other people in the shop who were also waiting in line - and that's when it hit me!

The worst part about shopping on Boxing Day is not so much the traffic. It isn't the awful music on the radio. It isn't the crowds, or waiting in line, or the shopaholics with the glazed eyes.

It's more insidious than that. It's having to look at the rubbish that other people are buying. It's realising that nobody in the line is buying anything that you would even remotely consider buying in your wildest dreams, even for your worst enemy!

I saw a woman buying not one but two copies of a nauseating computer game. Another person was stocking up on Pokemon and Tele Tubbies stuff and a couple of teenagers were buying Boyzone and other instant coffee type band CDs, simpering stupidly all the while. If anybody even considers giving me any of that stuff, I will do something utterly horrible to them, and that is not a threat, it's a promise!

That's when I really started to wonder why the heck I had bothered going to all this trouble in the first place. I should have realised that most of these yokels do not have anything remotely resembling anything that related to good taste.

What was I worried about? I really do not know. Maybe it's the masochist in me who wanted to go out and mingle with the hordes of sweaty, smelly, shopaholics and bargain hunters.

Maybe, subconsciously I was hoping that all the Boccelli, Safina, Brightman, Franklin and jazz CDs would have been sold out and that I wouldn't have to worry so much about the future of humanity.

But they were not. So I guess most of the people out there are happy with their Pokemon and Tele Tubbies paraphernalia and the garish, gaudy, glittery mass produced nonsense that they're brainwashed by the media into buying. I'm not.