The Harrods disadvantage: Em Sherif reviewed

I am never bored with Harrods, only disgusted, and it is disgust of the most animated and exciting kind. It is Nabokov’s fish-tank of a department store, but with lampshades, not hebephilia. Its wares have surpassed its beginnings, which were haberdashery. Charles Harrod’s first shop was at 228 Borough High Street when George IV, who would love Harrods, was king. His second was at Stepney. Harrod came west for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and now we have this: the most crazed example of a crazed aesthetic, which is imperial Edwardian. Or Disney pinnacles the colour of blood. Harrods used to have a boutique in which almost-normal children could be transformed into Disney princesses. I await the cryonics department with ecstasy.

That Harrods is now owned by Qatar Investment Authority is surely a mad kind of justice, and its motto Omnia Omnibus Ubique (‘All things for all people, everywhere’) is such bald fiction I am impressed. I don’t shop here, of course – I can’t afford it – but I come to do my favourite thing, which is laughing at rich people’s taste. You can take the measure of their lives, or lack thereof; Asma al-Assad bought a fondue set. There is always something new to make your eyeballs fizz. Today I am mesmerised by a Christian Dior skateboard and a pair of Prada table-tennis bats. I don’t bother to note the prices. It would make my fists itch.

Harrods must disembody itself or it would fail on its own terms. It’s a shopping mall, not a place, and shopping malls must not be connected to the earth. If they were then no one would buy anything, for isn’t the earth by itself enough? And a shopping mall must have restaurants to succour the almost-human shopper because wanting things is exhausting.