Starting Christmas shopping in Salisbury on the 4th December?! It’s okay, I have checked my temperature and I am perfectly well. This year I am getting my life organised and starting shopping for Christmas early (for me, anyway!). And, most importantly, I am shopping in town and not online this year!

Christmas shopping for me in the recent past has usually meant on 21rd December going to web sites and buying from those who still ‘guarantee pre-Christmas deliveries’. Fraught and fairly mean spirited, if I am honest. “Bah! Humbug!”

Online shopping for Christmas has never left me with a warm glow of seasonal good cheer. Online shopping is, for the most part, a streamlined and sterilised activity. It’s been designed to be. We don’t like the interaction once we’re in the process of buying on line. We want to get in, get on, get out. We don’t want the sights and sounds that come at Christmas time, or at any time come to that. We want to find that item and buy it, never having left our seat, perhaps only to pour yourself a Baileys. (yuk! - ed. yum! - rob.) Efficiency online is what we strive for. But efficiency comes at a cost and sometimes it’s a price too far.

So, I am donning my thick winter coat and gloves and braving the crowds to buy 101 useless things that’ll be back in the returns bucket before you know it. But with the frustrations and the annoyances and poor customer service and crowds and miserable people doing the same as me, I’ll enjoy a large dollop of seasonal good cheer.

Hmmm, you know, suddenly the prospect of the online Christmas shop appeals after all!