Camping out for cut-price trousers is not my style

Stranded in the Highlands with no internet available, it was hard to ignore the itch I felt to log on and check my messages, maybe update a Facebook entry. But one thing I did not feel was the urge to go online and shop for cut-price goods.

After all, it was less than 24 hours since I'd bought my final present. And though I like a half-price handbag as much as the next woman, nothing could possibly have tempted me to start shopping again on Christmas Day.

But, it seems, I'm the odd one out. Between the sprouts and brandy butter, 3.5 million of us hit the internet, channelling a further £53 million into the virtual high street. That's more than 700,000 more than attended an Anglican church service.

I've never been religious. In fact, I imagined hell would freeze over before I agreed with the Pope. But this week I find myself backing both Catholic and Anglican leaders as they speak out against our rampant acquisitiveness.

Dr Rowan Williams had the environment in mind when he warned against us treating the planet as "a warehouse of resources to serve humanity's greed".

But it all starts with our consumer obsession - cheap goods, manufactured in polluting Chinese factories, shipped across the world for our entertainment.

Pope Benedict, meanwhile, lamented the seasonal emphasis on materialism, saying riches make us selfish and uncaring. It sounds like a naive simplification but he surely has a point.

Three and a half million of us thought it was better to snap up bargains on Christmas Day than talk to our families. And all because major retailers such as Marks & Spencer, Comet and Dixons decided to launch their sales early online.

By now the sales are in full swing. Many shops began them by stealth, in the weeks before Christmas, to beat the predicted credit crunch sales slump. Yesterday, a record number of shops pulled up the shutters. Stores such as Debenhams have slashed prices by up to 70 per cent.

Of course the conventional definition of the wellbeing of our economy is based on us behaving like this - spending for Britain throughout December and January and guiltily forgetting to open our credit card bills for the rest of the year.

It's a vicious circle, a personal credit crunch, and it's a matter of great regret that the drive to shop now dominates the season of goodwill. But it is the Next sale that truly baffles me. Hours before dawn this morning, the clothing store flung open its doors. I cycled through Oxford Street at 5am on this day last year and saw the frenzy for myself. It reminded me of those Cold War newsreels of Russian peasants lining up to buy bread. At least they had hunger as an excuse.

But what weird urge causes people to camp overnight for the chance to buy a cut-price pair of very average trousers?