Introduction

When I enter big, brightly lit Westfield-style shopping centres, I feel that I instantly crave a chocolate milkshake. I need one. From when I was a kid through to my late teens, I went into those places to hang out with friends, meet girlfriends and look at the Air Jordans I couldn't afford. As I grew up in a town about a 50-minute drive from such a place, it was a relative treat to go there. Every time I would get myself a chocolate milkshake. It became routine. Now when I go to such places – very reluctantly – to buy a TV or to get a present for someone I don't know very well, I sometimes feel that I can smell one when I know there are none around. I would know if there were because I would have one in my hand. There is something of a Pavlovian imprint left on me from those early mundane experiences. I have changed a lot since then. I now go through some kind of anti-Gruen Transfer that makes me feel as though I’m in a hospital when I go into a large shopping centre, so great is my dislike for such places because of their overt consumerism and taste relations, which are now ‘not for the likes of me’. Hospitals have always terrified me: they make me want to faint, and influence the way I now feel in shopping centres – both make me feel so anxious. It must be something to do with the bright lighting and the sterile environments of medical practices – rampant consumerism and death – which I don't really like very much. So, I have the somewhat pleasurable feeling of craving a milkshake in shopping centres, often a ‘large’ which made me feel bloated and queasy when I was younger, whereas I now feel anxious just being in that space, because it makes me feel like I’m in a hospital, which is where you go when you are sick. I developed a rather ordinary habit as a teenager and have been affected: an indelible imprint on my disposition swells during the time I am in that space.