I love to shop. Do you?

It saddens me that there are people who 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, but hating shopping happens to people who've never shopped properly, and allow one bad experience to sully the rest of their shopping life. It is extremely sad,

a) because it just is and b) because we all have to shop, 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, some shopping experiences are hellish. Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon, for example: swarms of people milling around like grubs; the sense of despair; the grotesque, palpable greed ... But this scenario has as little to do with true shopping as a drunken fumble in an alleyway has to do with a weekend at the Ritz with your loved one.

A love of shops is bred in the bone. If you think it's normal to go into ecstasies over sugar tongs, tennis shoes, crayons, book bindings and chess pieces, and if your nearest and dearest agree, then those ecstasies become part of you, and part of your response to the world. My mother was, and remains, a champion shopper. But she shops in a very different way from me. I like tat - stupid, pointless, lovely, glittery cheap things - and she doesn't. She didn't shop much, but when she did, you knew about it. I prefer to shop little and often.

When I was growing up in Brussels with frequent trips to Paris, we seemed to be either improbably rich or improbably hard-up, with no inbetweens. My parents separated when I was two, and my mother and I lived by ourselves in a freakily minimalist apartment on the Avenue de Tervuren. My mother, a designer, has always had minimal tastes, so there we were, with acres of bareness and the odd exquisite objet. We ate porridge when we were broke and tins and tins of sardines.

When we weren't broke ... well, my mother tells a story which I find crippling, but which I pass on anyway. I was about five, she about 23, and we were in an up-market Brussels supermarket called Rob - a kind of Belgian Fortnum's. As we queued to pay, she remembers me telling her, at the top of my voice, that we'd forgotten the caviar: Maman, maman, on a oubliè le caviar. One can only imagine the delight of the other shoppers.

We were well dressed, my mother and I (she still is. I am writing this in fleecy pyjama bottoms and an ancient, dog-smelling jumper). When she married my stepfather and we came to live in England, in Seventies Islington, I remember one of the mothers on the square talking disapprovingly about my "funny French clothes". Even then, aged 10, I felt pity for the woman in question - dungareed, braless and make-upless, with hair like rats' tails - rather than any deep sense of hurt. I was shy and learning English, so said nothing, but it didn't stop me thinking that she had hands like raw hams and that a good blow-dry wouldn't have gone amiss. She needed The Shops, poor her, and she didn't know how.

Anyway, there I was, in my clothes. I had a chic crop (which would have been more chic had I not looked like a boy with stuckout ears) and the most conservative, ankle-skimming, top-button-done-up wardrobe imaginable.

Thrown into the mix was the fact that my mother kept running to India and Pakistan with me in tow. So in April there I'd be, Little Miss Square, and in May I'd be running around barefoot in a shalwaar kameez, bugging my grandmother to pierce my nose (which she eventually did, in the garden, with a red-hot sewing needle; I snorted the earring-back by mistake and had to be held upside down).

Normally, my mother is always charming to shop assistants, but if they fail to please she is the rudest woman I know. If they are crap at their job and uninterested, or - God forbid - crap at their job, uninterested and glossy (you don't want your sales girl yawning and showing her expensive veneers while swathed in clouds of cashmere) . ... well, we're talking nuclear.

First, my mother raises an eyebrow - its arc says: "You are just so unbelievably ghastly." Being on the receiving end of the eyebrow is startling enough. Hitherto bored, manicure-examining sales girls who have been busy sneering at your shoes suddenly stand up straight and get that look animals do when they know for a fact that a bigger animal is going to eat them. But it's too late! They should have paid attention earlier! The stoat is in for the kill, and the vole, in one horrible moment of realisation, knows it's her bones that will be snapped.

Post-eyebrow, we get an "Excuse me?" so filled with disbelief and contempt that it sends shivers down the sturdiest spines. After the gibbering responses provoked by the Excuse Me, we get the attack proper, the vocabulary of which is innocuous enough: "Could you please explain to me why I have been waiting for 20 minutes to find out if you have these in a Medium" etc, etc. The attack is delivered smoothly and softly - the stoat dispatches its vole victim swiftly and does not toy with it. The sales assistant is nearly in tears.

My mother's intolerance is founded on two principles: a) that there is nothing wrong in working in the service industry and b) that if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. Having had a series of rubbish jobs for which I was paid a pittance, I can't entirely concur, and so I can't do Vole-Stoat very well. But a friend and I, having been treated as if we were two poos in frocks by an especially unlovely sales assistant in Brompton Cross, once came up with an excellent, idiot-proof alternative. It's not Vole-Stoat, but it is pretty good. You stand there, feeling small and shabby, and then, as you're about to leave, you say to the (female) shop assistant, quite loudly, YOU HAVE A MOUSTACHE. And then you leave.

My father loved the shops, too. He had dozens of shirts, for example, in pink, yellow and lavender. He was one of those men who used to love, and appreciate, all the women around him - his wives, of whom there were many over the years, his daughter, his mother - being well dressed. He had a horror of unfemininity, which, in my case, translated itself into the purchasing of clothes - at my urging - that my mother wouldn't have approved of: short clothes, or clothes with décolletages, or clothes that somehow felt racy. I was, naturally, in heaven. The only thing wrong with his shopping skills was that he was unnaturally keen on yellow, my least favourite colour. There is a slew of photographs of me as a child looking jaundiced in yellow coats, yellow hats and yellow boots.

When I last saw my father, in an old people's home, he was dying of cancer and Alzheimer's. He was extremely badly dressed, in a horrible sweatshirt and floppy trousers - and the adult nappy had never been part of his repertoire before. He was gaga. I went outside, smoked 20 cigarettes and sobbed away to myself, then I gave the nurse some money to buy him decent clothes. She said his clothes were freshly laundered every day and that he didn't mind what he wore. I did Vole-Stoat: my mother's daughter, as well as my pink-and-lavender-shirted father's. When he died and I collected his things, there were two crisp new shirts, a new navy cardigan and two new pairs of brown cords in his wardrobe. And on his dressing table, there was a picture of me peering out grumpily in a canary yellow anorak.

The Shops, by India Knight, is published on 6 November, Viking, £12.99.