What on earth's wrong with a bit of shopping?
I'm not a great shopper. A year or two ago I took my family on a sailing holiday in Croatia. When we went ashore in the ancient town of Split, it took me a moment or two to tie up the dinghy. Fatal. By the time I had climbed up to the quayside there was no sign either of my daughters or my wife. They had vanished.
Then I saw a row of fashionable stores set back from the waterfront and the mystery was solved. They were in Topshop – trying on hats.
The experience was not an unusual one. Show my teenage daughters a clothes shop and they're in it. I, on the other hand, will just pace about impatiently waiting until they're finished.
Neal Lawson, the author of All Consuming, would approve of my behaviour. He says that buying stuff is the "heroin of human happiness". In our frenetic consumer society, he argues, we have to go on and on shopping because otherwise the whole system would grind to a halt. Instead we have to be sold "just enough to keep us going, but never enough that our wants are satisfied".
Geoffrey Miller, a professor at the University of New Mexico, comes to much the same conclusion in another new study. Runaway consumerism, he thinks, "offers little more than narcissism, exhaustion and alienation".
How did we get here, wonders The Times's Carol Midgley. "How did we get to a point where shopping became the premier leisure activity, where we gladly boarded the work-to-spend treadmill, the insatiable pursuit of 'more', which resulted in there being, for example, 121 mobile phones for every 100 people in the UK by 2008?"
Midgley went off to a busy shopping mall to find out. The young designer-bag-laden consumers she talked to weren't very enlightening. They said they loved shopping, that it got them out of the house, that while the recession might have made them hunt more for bargains it hadn't killed their enthusiasm.
Good. Capitalism would be in dire straights if everyone behaved like me (although, come to think of it, I do my bit for the consumer society by owning a ridiculously un-cost-effective boat that requires constant expensive repairs and new parts.)
Of course, the shopping habit can be taken too far. Television advertising undoubtedly encourages foolish shopholics to spend too much. And perhaps Professor Miller is right that some of this spending has to do with people endlessly repackaging themselves with fancy new dresses and Rolex watches in a desperate and usually pointless effort to attract the opposite sex.
But there's nothing really wrong with shopping and, unlike heroin, it doesn't kill anyone. I may not enjoy it, but lots of people do – it's not called retail therapy for nothing – and I'm sure my daughters don't find it exhausting, alienating or even narcissistic to buy a new dress or two from time to time.
Tabloid money... meet Comrade Vintage Krug
• Churchill presided over a War Cabinet of just nine people, says Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express. Today, 35 politicians sit round Brown's Cabinet table. It shows how dramatically the professional political class in Britain has grown. Research by the BBC shows we now have 30,000 paid politicians, compared to just 3,000 in 1980.
The huge increase is the result of Labour measures, such as the introduction of full-time salaried councillors, the creation of new assemblies in Scotland and Wales and the growth in the number of political advisers at all levels of government.
"The total bill for all this subsidised careerism is now more than £500m." Our MPs and ministers cost at least £167m; municipal representatives cost taxpayers £254m. Britain currently has more professional politicians than ambulance staff. Yet in the late Victorian age, when MPs were not paid at all, they governed a quarter of the world, while now they do very little, having "surrendered Britain's independence", and most of their power to make laws, to the EU.
• New figures reveal Ken Livingstone spent more than £16k dining out at taxpayers' expense in his second term as London mayor, says Fiona McIntosh in The Sunday Mirror. He ran up bills of up to £1,200 a time at London's finest restaurants. "Not just a champagne socialist, then. He's Comrade Vintage Krug."
• "The revolting criminally inclined MPs running our country appear to have taken up a new policy in the wake of the expenses scandal – omerta, the code of silence," says Kelvin MacKenzie in The Sun. Take Bob Ainsworth. The defence secretary won't reveal how much capital-gains tax he paid on the £200k profit he made from 'flipping' his second home.
And his office tells me he won't talk about it. "Ainsworth, my old son, it's our money. We paid for that flat and we have a right to know… My suspicion is that… you paid virtually no tax whereas we – the mere serfs who fund your lifestyle – would have had to cough up around £50k."
