Department stores have fascinated me since I was small. My mother’s family used to own one on Oxford Street, and visiting the place as a child I was always impressed by the size of it, amused by the old-fashioned deference of the staff, and intrigued by the intricate network of creaky old lifts and escalators, particularly the private lift that led up to the top-floor boardroom complex. No doubt all of this percolated away inside my brain for years before I decided to write the book. I also wanted to point up the relentless absurdity of consumerism. I hate being thought of as a ‘consumer’. I hate the demeaning connotations of the word. I hate this idea that people have been reduced to nothing more than creatures that exist only to eat and shit, like locusts. In Days, I want to show the idiocy of buying things for buying’s sake. Hence the riots at sales (which in the book are termed “shopping mauls”, ho ho) and the window shoppers who sit all day watching the window displays, mesmerised. I was living in America at the time I wrote the book. I don’t think that’s unconnected with the book’s contents.