Xmas shopping meltdown starts early this year

According to a new report from those masters of the digital metric, comScore, more than one third of online shoppers in the UK, France and Germany have already started doing their Xmas shopping. If they had surveyed one particular little Yorkshire village they would have found at least one shopper who has done the same: me. I have been doing pretty much all my seasonal shopping online for the best part of a decade now. It has nothing to do with me practising what I preach, although that was the reason that I upped sticks and moved from South London to South Yorkshire 12 years or so ago. I was writing books and magazine articles saying how wonderful the Internet was, and how it was going to change the way we work. Teleworking was still something that existed more in media column inches than reality at the time, but I was saying the Internet would change all that. And so it was I moved from city life to rural idyll, eventually training my clients, my editors, my publishers and assorted PR bunnies so that after a year or so I did not have to travel down to London once every week to meet them.