A shopping centre is a fantasy trap

I took my mother to get a bone scan at the imaging clinic yesterday and after she went in with the practitioners I was told the wait until the procedure finished would be about 40 minutes, so since I was close to the department store I chose this moment to go and buy some shoes. My shoes were a mess and had deteriorated to a state of dilapidation equaled only by the facade of some inner-city luxury apartment. Unfortunately, unlike that, these were just as bad on the inside as they were on the outside.

After I reached the shopping centre I immediately varied my trajectory looking for a toilet and - engrossed in the difficult things to do with organising my elderly mother that had occupied me beforehand - I promptly walked straight into the ladies' loo before realising my mistake and backtracking, embarrassed. Once I had looked after nature in the appropriate room I turned south and made my way to the department store anchoring that end of the shopping centre. I had never realised how stimulating shopping centres are. Picking a path among the strolling walkers - people just passing time inside, or those conforming to type and window-shopping - I navigated through the arcade past the escalator, around the coffee kiosk, past the jewellery store, through the portable gondolas displaying women's clothing, and between the security stanchions located at the entrance to the department store. To get here I had had to cope as well with music - the insane kind of piped music that saturates all shopping centres and which makes mere photographs of the inside of shopping centres so entirely dissimilar to the reality they actually present if you visit - that asked me to slow down, smell the roses, spend time to look, attend to the plethora of wares available to the unwary.

All I wanted was shoes. I had no need for a new watch, a pair of running shoes, a hot coffee with milk. To buy shoes was my object, and so when I arrived at the shoe section at the very far extremity of the department store I picked up what I wanted, told the sales clerk it needed to be in size 11, walked to the cash register, paid, and walked out of the department store into the hot summer day.

There was no way I was going to return into the bowels of the shopping centre with its startling array of goods displayed with all the ingenuity bequeathed by 150 years of retail touting expertise, and with its insistent, saccharine piped music, something that gets into your system and pools there like a puddle of spilled honey, clogging your joints, infiltrating your intestines, slowing down your movements and begging you - please! - to stop and spend time and money on things of which you have absolutely no mortal need. I realised in my extremity - please try caring for an elderly parent with dementia if you wish to revisit the most difficult periods of your life: those linked to raising small children - that the shopping centre represented a complete fantasy that has nothing to do with satisfying actual needs, and everything to do with flattering consumers who enter it so as to extend indefinitely the period of time they spend inside. A shopping centre is a fantasy trap, a slow-moving carnivorous flower that gently encloses you until you are immobilised. When you are, it carefully sucks the life out of you until there is nothing left but a dry husk, shivering in the wind.