The plan to do last year’s Christmas shop at Peter Jones on 23 December was doomed from its sorry inception. I was soaked by the time I got there, my plimsolls waterlogged, kept going only by my expectation of a quiet and civilised department store, rammed to the skylights with perfect presents. Instead, I found myself spearing a path through the seething, teeming, hostile masses with my sodden umbrella, and, worse — finding its stock all but decimated.
The claustrophobia that ripped through me was so violent that I was forced to run to the toilets to hide — and even then I had to queue. I shivered in the stairwell and contemplated defeat. What do you do about all those uncles? In-laws? The distant and slightly boring cousins, the godchildren you can’t quite see the point of, the friends who every year make a point of sending amusing but completely pointless trinkets swathed in pop-culture wrapping paper? Two words came to me like a revelation: The Tate!
Enveloped in the great gallery’s warm interior, everything fell into place. The shop bulged with products suitable for all ages, creeds and categories: ‘how to draw’ books for children; Litchenstein cushions; massive murals by the madman Richard Dadd; Damien Hirst ‘pill’ scarves for the junkie in your life. The experience was enough to prompt a serious question: why make a hurried mass-purchase anywhere other than a museum shop? They are civilised and well-staffed and free from the tyranny of pounding, lifestyle-choice dance music that makes shopping almost everywhere else such hell.
Yesterday, a trawl around three major London galleries confronted me with everything from William Morris print scarves to a solar-powered statuette of the Queen that waves when placed in the sunlight. If you’ve aunts to buy for, the Royal Academy shop does a lovely line in canvas bags printed with Barbara Raes.
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