Willy Trolove: Agony for those of us who didn't get a shopping gene

Scientists are always trying to find the genes that make us who we are. Every now and then they identify a new gene that causes some disease or is responsible for a particular behavioural trait. For years they have been looking for the obesity gene, the criminal gene, and the let's-get-together-and-have-a-civil-union gene.

But the gene I most desperately want them to find is the shopping gene.

The shopping gene is passed down through the maternal side of the family. My dear old grandmothers had it. My mother has it. My sister certainly has it. In fact, I am yet to meet a single woman (or, indeed, a married one) who doesn't have the shopping gene.

Men can carry the shopping gene but it is often dormant, except when they are in environments with raised testosterone levels, such as boat shows, sports stores and the tool aisle at the DIY centre.

People with the shopping gene are easy to spot. They enter a trance-like state in the presence of shops. They experience a heightened sense of wellbeing when returning from the mall. And they suffer deep withdrawal whenever they have to do without shopping for extended periods.

The typical woman with the shopping gene is fiercely systematic. She plans her shopping days in advance. She wears sensible shoes. She arranges to meet other women with the shopping gene at pre-arranged shopping hotspots.

Once shopping is under way, she carefully inspects the items she wants to buy, drives back and forth between different shops, compares prices, then saves herself a fraction of the cost of the fuel she has just burned by buying the best bargain available.

She has at least two credit cards. That way, when she buys an expensive item she can put half the bill on each card. Thanks to some as-yet-unexplained mathematical rule, this makes the item a lot cheaper than it originally was.

The typical man with the shopping gene isn't so systematic. Speed is his watchword. He shops on impulse and sometimes doesn't think things through as much as he should. He splashes out on a new wardrobe when he doesn't really know what a wardrobe is. He buys a sports car when it's been years since he played sport. He purchases a lawnmower when he lives in an apartment.

All this is foreign to me. You see, I lack the shopping gene. Walking into a clothes shop brings on the kind of clamminess that reminds me of school dances. If I need new clothes, I wear my oldest stuff around the house hoping that someone will notice, take pity and buy me something new.

But shopping can't be avoided at Christmas time. As December stumbles drunkenly towards its Ho-Ho-Ho conclusion, I have to figure out how to shop for all the people on my Christmas present list. Admittedly, there are only a few names on this list, but there might as well be a few thousand, for I have no idea what to get any of them.

People with the shopping gene don't have this problem. The festive season is their chance to rise magnificently above the rest of us. They have spent the year ferreting away all sorts of useful information about what to get so-and-so for Christmas. They know exactly how so-and-so spends their spare time, what so-and-so would like to be when they grow up, and how fabulous so-and-so looks in red.

And when we ask the people who have the shopping gene what they want for Christmas, they say things like "You know what I want" (when we obviously don't), "Any old thing will do" (when clearly it won't), and "It's the thought that counts" (when, quite plainly, the thought alone is far from adequate).

Without the shopping gene, my Christmas shopping will be the same as it always is. I will spend days wandering around malls, lost in a mind-fog of shopping incompetence, unable to find anything to buy. The closer Christmas gets, the thicker the fog will grow.

At last, in the final desperate and clammy hours of Christmas Eve, I will buy presents that are either wholly inappropriate (a bottle opener for a non-drinker), fundamentally pointless (novelty ears for an adult) or plain offensive (a new kind of potato peeler for my girlfriend).

Come the big day, the poor sods on my list will be so pleased with my presents that they will immediately hide them away until they can think of someone else to give them to next year.

Please, scientists, find the shopping gene. Figure out a way to produce it and bottle it and give it to those of us who don't have it.

And please hurry. I don't know how many more Christmases I can survive without it.