Oxford Street was built for lunchtime. At least it was for me. When I worked in the West End, if I wasn’t having a fancy lunch, at one o’clock I’d nip out from my office and spend the best part of an hour wandering up and down it, dipping into WH Smith’s, Virgin, HMV, Borders, Waterstones and the like, shopping for newspapers, books, magazines, DVDs, CDs, boxed sets and vinyl on a kind of cultural quest, curiously hoovering up anything new or interesting and systematically filling those gaping fissures in my post-modern academic education.
It was the same with clothes, toys and gifts, as I’d nip in and out of Selfridges or John Lewis or Debenhams in search of something my wife/daughters/mother-in-law would think had been bought with due care and consideration.
