Brenda woke me early on Sunday morning and said, "It's time." With a cry of joy bubbling in my throat, I leapt out of bed, raced to the cupboard and quickly dug out the fur-lined handcuffs and latex rubber gimp mask, but by the time I found the riding crop she was already standing by the door in her comfortable shoes shouting at me to hurry up or there would be nothing left on the shelves.

The whelp, Clive, was hopping up and down. A steady stream of gibbering noises poured from his stupid little juvenile mouth. With mounting horror, I realised what was going on.

Bitter experience has taught me that resistance is futile, so it was with a heavy heart that I left my so-called home and got behind the wheel of what Brenda laughingly refers to as my "car".

This year I had made up my mind to resist the impulse to commit random acts of violence against women and children while doing the Christmas shopping.

It's not as if I have anything in particular against women and children, but at this time of year they are jointly responsible for unleashing seven kinds of bedlam in shopping mauls around the country. There should be a United Nations protocol governing their behaviour.

I took the wrong entrance at the temple of Mammon, giving Brenda the apparent right to call me a retard. This at least gave me the apparent right to park in a disabled bay. Bracing myself for the stench of filthy lucre, I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath, coughed up a bit of blood, and walked through the sliding doors straight onto level four of Dante's Annual Inferno.

Within the first 10 seconds, I had an ancient creature reeking of formaldehyde spit on my shoes and a runaway kid on a pair of Heelys slam into the back of me. Before I had time to whip out my stun gun, Brenda grabbed my arm and dragged me deeper into an animated version of an Edvard Munch creation, had he been disturbed enough to paint a South African Christmas shopping scene.

Working class families in this country have many quaint traditions, one of which entails giving each child a kilogram of refined sugar to eat before going anywhere in public. This means that mom and dad get to have loads of fun identifying their offspring purely by the pitch and frequency of their screams.

Somebody needs to invent a surgical device that lowers the tone of a child's voice. At least a boy's voice breaks at adolescence, but a girl can keep shrieking well into her nineties.

Nobody is being left at home this year. The geriatrics and the newborn are out in full force. I swear I saw one woman who must have induced birth just to make it to the shops before they were depleted. She was in the Small Electrical Appliances section and had what looked like a foetus strapped to her back. Perhaps she was looking for a cheap incubator.

A pregnant woman was pushing a trolley filled with at least nine children. They couldn't possibly all have been hers, because they were different colours. I expect they had either been abducted or were on special in an aisle I had yet to discover.

My favourite aisle was the one selling Glomail and Verimark products. It was full of slack-jawed people eating popcorn and staring endlessly at the products, trapped in a Pavlovian stupor unable to choose between the Air-O-Space Instant Bed In A Bag and Kevin Trudeau's Seven CD Memory Kit.

Personally, I would be a little wary of buying anything that promises to improve your memory by 500%. Who, in their right mind, would want to be in the middle of breakfast and suddenly remember the contours of their mother's birth canal?

I came across one family of indeterminate nationality shouting like lunatics and taking photographs of each other in front of the McDonald's takeaway. These people should not even be allowed inside a public place. What happens when they walk around the corner to find a clutch of slutty young elves in skin-tight bodysuits hawking cellphone contracts?

I also saw one elderly couple fondling the power tools and speaking in a language consisting solely of consonants and facial expressions. What do they plan on doing with an angle grinder back in Kyrgyzstan?

I suppose it is heavy enough to stun a slow-witted reindeer or whatever it is they have in the land of the doomed.

To be fair, some of our own are little better. I saw children fresh off the farm, barefoot with sloping foreheads and close-set eyes, being bought educational toys that are almost certain to cause long-term damage to any child's intellectual development.

Giving Brenda the slip, I dragged Clive into a shop that was selling everything from herbal highs to packets of "baby funnel web spiders hand picked and freeze-dried for your convenience and pleasure".

On the reverse side, it said the effects of an attack were "profuse sweating, vomiting, abdominal cramps, delirium and coma". Now at least I know what has been attacking me every Friday night for the last 20 years.

I asked a blind man to keep an eye on Clive and took refuge in the men's toilet where I found myself sharing a urinal with a man who looked like a shell-shocked war veteran. I affected a few twitches for his benefit and said, "I know how you feel." It turned out I didn't. But even so, having a nervous tic since birth is no reason to pee on my leg.

This is all the fault of those three shiftless kings who abandoned their kingdoms and sloped off to Bethlehem with pockets full of gold, frankincense and myrrh at the first sign of a bright and yonder star. All of this could have been avoided if they had simply sent a postcard.

Goodwill to all Mankind?

I haven't hated people this much since I was in the army.