Shopping on the road to Damascus

Once more this year we have been told that Christmas sales are down. Hardly surprising, Christmas shopping having become such a merciless ordeal. Useless goods that children have been relentlessly programmed to expect are piled along aisles where distraught people struggle to remain clear-headed despite the brain-garbling cacophony of Yuletide muzak. The sales staff, mostly amateur at this time of year, are even less helpful than usual. Getting to the shops and home again, whether at the mercy of traffic jams, haphazard bus services or inadequate trains, adds to the utter joylessness of the experience.

Such considerations prompted me this year to try a new tack, to make the shopping an end in itself, to concentrate on enjoying the getting and let the giving take care of itself. I sought a place that was neither predominantly Christian, nor degraded by generations of consumerism, beset neither by avid traders nor by desperate spivs. I decided to do my Christmas shopping in Damascus.

It was, I know now, the right decision. The only fly in my spikenard was British Airways. At roughly the time when our flight should have touched down at Damascus, we were told that, as the airport was closed owing to fog, we would be overflying to Amman. As such inconveniences are only to be expected, you would think that the world's favourite airline would have a routine for dealing with them. Apparently not. For an hour we sat in the aircraft. Then we were allowed into an airport lounge, nothing to eat, nothing to drink, no toilets. After another hour a willowy individual in BA uniform led the first- and business-class passengers away, we knew not whither. Eventually he returned and summoned to his elegant side all holders of passports issued by Arab nations. They left and he left with them.

The time ticked by. An hour later the rest of us were thrown out of the lounge as summarily as we had been thrown into it. Our passports were taken from us, and we were pushed out on to the pavement. A filthy minibus showed up; men trampled women and children to get into it, though they had as little idea where it might be going as the rest of us did. Eventually we found ourselves dumped at the airport hotel where, there being no rooms free, we were as welcome as stinking fish. Breakfast was an urn of lukewarm water, a jar of Nescafe and a basket of yesterday's croissants. When I got to Damascus I found that I had lost my hotel booking.

One of the mothers shepherding her two tired children through the arrogance and indifference of Brutish Airways was Rana Kabbani, who took me under her wing, sorted out my hotel, took me to a sumptuous lunch at her parents' house and then, while both our heads were still reeling from sleeplessness, straight to the souk, to the street of spice and perfume sellers; and there I found, as I expected to find, that shopping in the traditional Orient is first and foremost a human encounter.

Where goods are not promoted, and packaging does not represent most of their value, the quality of the merchandise and the buyer's discrimination become the most important elements in the negotiation. The perfumier climbed up and down his tiny booth, bringing down bottle after bottle of richly coloured essences, reverently dabbing our forearms, wrists, palms, elbows with the glass stoppers, until we were enveloped in a fragrant fog. We sat, we sniffed, we discussed, we bought oud and amber for me, musk and lily for Rana. Such a collection of the souls of departed trees and flowers seemed to me beyond price; we had spent, by Western computation, pennies.

There are souks and souks. You can be trampled, badgered, rooked and run over in a souk, but not in a Syrian souk. Though they may be busy, Syrian souks are not jostling. Where veiled ladies move majestically, unmindful of passing traffic, pushing is clearly out of place. I never saw such a bewildering variety of veils. Short veils, long veils, big veils, small veils, veils pinned under the nose, veils pinned under the chin and veils not pinned at all, black veils, white veils, thick veils, veils that floated, veils that skimmed the ground. Many diverse communities live in and around Damascus, and many more visit the city; I gave up speculating about who might be who. So unprovincial are the Damascenes that even in the mosques nobody was disturbed by my outlandish presence.

What they might have noticed is that I did my shopping with a tight western face; when I realised that mine was the only such face I concentrated on clearing my mind of the kind of diffuse tension that afflicts Occidentals. I began to make myself live in the now, enjoying my search for the perfect sugared almond, the wittiest belly-dancing dress. I drank the coriander coffee the merchants offered me, allowing the negotiation to mature pleasantly until each party was satisfied. The merchant, for his part, wanted to show me this for this price, that for that, to teach me about his wares, to see how I reacted. To close the sale too quickly was not only to disappoint him but to insult him in some subtle way.

Then he would even the score by giving me a gift. When I left the confiserie of Ghraoui, the lad who served me put a glace aubergine, a sticky four- inch tourmaline stuffed with ground walnuts, in my hand, a sign that I had bought too much too fast. I took my punishment and discovered that aubergine is of course a fruit.

For five days I wandered among hawk-faced desert Arabs patiently trying shoe after shoe on their children's feet, brides peering at themselves in flyspecked mirrors to see how various fantastic coronets of paste and fake pearls became them, clutches of dour-faced ladies examining heaps of apparently identical pyjamas, past the maker of caparisons for horses, down the street of the dye-sellers, the blacksmiths, the butchers, through the fleamarket, amid the glittering booths of the goldsmiths. I made mistakes and I got things right. I hope my friends will like what I give them; if they don't, malesh.