Ode to John Lewis ...

Ah John Lewis, mecca to the middle classes, gateway to all things sanitised and shiny. John Lewis is a wondrous place mainly because yesterday I went there to get some Dead Sea Shampoo and left with neon pink nail varnish, clip lock storage tubs and a Christian Dior face cream reduced from £23 pounds to a tenner! A tenner!

Normally I eschew sales, not because I can afford to but simply because I can't hack the cut throat rack rummaging. I get pushed aside by those women with the shopper thousand yard stares, their thumbs as agile as a fox rifling the hangers with a mesmeric dexterity, their hawk eyes honing in on their cut price prey.

The sheer messiness of sales sends me into a bamboozled state - I'm like Rachel in that Friends episode where she's hidden between the racks of wedding dresses mindlessly puffing on a whistle. Sales are simply too much like hard work for a girl who if it were an Olympic sport would limp in last, or simply not qualify like the Scottish football team. This is all of course self evident when I buy neon pink nail varnish.

So thank the lord for John Lewis where at its worst there is only ever organised chaos and at the most the only injuries you are likely to sustain are from middle aged lady elbows - they're sharp, but I'll take them over the acrylic nail claw of a Primark shopper any day.

In these recession addled times there's nothing quite like the one up manship of the unemployed young woman clocking a reflective shiny box of expensive face cream under strip lights in a greying bargain bin. Amongst the bone yard of neglected, unwanted and unloved self-tanners and hair nets I found Christian Dior. In your face Gordon Brown!