I'm going to let you into a secret. I really, really like shopping. The toppling of high street stores and chains over the last couple of years terrifies me. All of yer puritan 'the gaudy baubles of capitalism' and all yer techbro 'I can get what I want online' miss the crisis

Town and city centres are good things. Places where everyone can mingle and everyone can find something they need or want. And that means everyone. A high street of expensive artisan nonsense isn't the answer. Nor is an empty, windy canyon of boarded up shops

Shops are liminal spaces, an experience that isn't quite just exchanging money for a thing. Clothes shopping is a glorious palace of possible futures and dreams that isn't in anyway replicated by online shopping. Browsing in person is both physical and mental and it's surprising

I enjoy window shopping. I enjoy weightless feeling of drifting around shops. I enjoy browsing. It drives me to distraction that the only kind of shop that people see as morally pure is the bookshop. People need pots and knickers and chips too. People who work in shops are great

One of the most rubbish things about the 21st century is the pricing out of high streets (and their privatised adjuncts shopping centres) of poorer people. It was all 'oh no, the global chains are here!' but the alternative 'a shop of expensive artisan tat' wasn't the answer

Street markets and covered markets are brilliant. There should be more of them. But high streets and the shops in them are a twentieth century(ish) invention that we'll miss if they disappear completely. But going back to my original point, shopping is an experience I love

And you can get all hairshirt and be like 'silly Mark, falling victim to these palaces of capitalism' but what makes you think you have more autonomy in your online shopping? You have more choice, but you have far less autonomy in your browsing

I'm still enough of a working class kid to see shopping as gateway to other things and possible lives, as true in Topshop as in a secondhand bookshop. It's an amazing feeling to be able to purchase something that changes your day (and to have a little cash and choice to do that)

So, yes, I worry when our high street shops close. Shops that have been part of the national fabric for years. I know nothing is eternal and economies change, but not everything can be a boutique. Maybe shops being what we have as shared experiences isn't perfect, but what is?

If high street collapses completely, everything is turned into either a delivery job or warehouse job. Nothing about that is shared; no one gets to meet anyone. If you think shops were mercenary exploiters, a switch to fully online economy is going to really knock your socks off

There's been years in my life when I have had fuck all money, on benefits and more. And growing up I went through the 'Can't afford it so I hate it all' phase. But even then, a potter about the shops, market stalls, charity shops was something. High streets need mixed economies

I think it's because I've often very little money I've come to find shopping with what little surplus cash I have such a pleasure. I'd want everyone to have cash to go and buy something they really want and to feel really happy getting it home, for the good life to be out there