Shopping Malls

Despite what the airbrushed people in glossy magazines would have you believe, the majority of the human race is startlingly unattractive. Go to any shopping mall and you’ll see the the lumpen uglitariat en masse. Slack-jawed mouth-breathing men, and women with wide hips pressed into jeans tight as sausage casings. Both sexes in shapeless sweat shirts and sensible shoes, unsexy as a Russian bread queue. It's like they gave up on anyone seeing them naked years ago. Malls are idiot machines, looping hamster tube trails of the great unwashed, all mooching somewhere and going nowhere.

It’s not just the mutants. Malls are an assault to the senses. Bewildering acres of crap you don’t need are lit by humming fluorescence and blaring neon that make your eyes feel like a chameleon trying to play twister under a strobe light. Your ears are fricasseed by the tink whoosh of lifts, blotchy thin soup of background conversation, and gnawing tinny muzak that sounds like its being played through your fillings.

Isn’t it strange that we have hardly any mental picture of what malls look like on the outside? They’re aseptic, inward spaces with all the homeliness of an airport toilet. You get the feeling they get hosed down at night.

I’m old enough to remember the high street, where separate shops sold your bread, meat and veg. You would pop into a supermarket for odds and sods, but generally as you accumulated your groceries, each time you you’d step out on the pavement, into the breeze and under the sky. Sadly. shopping malls and the chant of ‘Give me convenience or give me death!’ have killed the high street and quick-limed its grave.