Penguin first published woman-about-town India Knight in 2000, introducing with My Life on a Plate a voice as fresh as a skinny latte. In On Shopping Knight celebrates the joys of retail therapy and shares with us the many and varied pleasures to be found online and on the high street, as well as her conviction that if you don't enjoy shopping, you're simply not doing it properly.

It saddens and amazes me that there are people out there who actually hate shopping. Men, for instance, are traditionally supposed to be hopeless at it: grumpy and monosyllabic when lured down the high street, wishing they were at home browsing the web for gadgets instead. Now, I don't want to come over all American self-help manual here (pity - I'd probably have a best-seller on my hands if I did: Because You're Worth It - How to Shop for the Self within You), but hating shopping is a terrible accident. It happens to people who've never shopped properly, and allow one bad experience to contaminate and sully the rest of their shopping life. It is extremely sad, a) because it just is and b) because we all have to shop, whether we like it or not. So we may as well like it. Even heterosexual blokes.

I can see how it happens, though, shop-hatred. Devoted as I am to my number one hobby, it would be plain foolish not to admit that some shopping experiences are absolutely hellish. I mentioned Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon in the introduction: swarms of people not knowing what they want but knowing they want it badly, milling around like grubs (I'm mixing my metaphors, but they're all to do with insects, you'll notice); the smell of cheap burgers; the rustle of nyloned thigh meeting nyloned thigh; the sense of despair; the grotesque, palpable greed.Yes, it's hell. But this scenario has as little to do with true shopping as a drunken fumble in an alleyway with a man who looks like a pig has to do with a weekend at the Ritz with the one you love. We'll get to that later. We'll make every shopping experience as far removed from the icky fumble as is humanly possible. It's not difficult when you know how - but it's not necessarily easy to know how, either. For many of us - well, many of you - shopping is simply bewildering. It promises, but doesn't deliver. There is a literal embarrassment of choice. And so shopping becomes joyless.

But first we need to go back to the beginning. Where does it come from, this delight in The Shops? Is it inherited? Is there a shopping gene? Certainly, my mother was - and remains - a champion shopper. But, possibly because of her ultra-luxe tastes, when I was a child she shopped in a very different way from me. Put simply, I like tat and the romance of tat - of stupid, pointless, lovely, glittery cheap things - and she doesn't. She didn't shop frequently, but when she did, you knew about it. I shop little and often, a method I strongly recommend.

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