I have been, as is my custom, avoiding town centres like the plague in the run up to Christmas. I managed to visit Watford without gracing the Harlequin Centre with my presence, stopped by London without setting foot on Oxford Street (not even the obligatory stop at the Apple Store on Regent Street, shock horror) and have managed to convince the wife to let me stay at home over the weekends rather than head for the shops and cafés of Derby.

Today I succumbed. My wife convinced me that I should come along and get some fresh air and exercise. Leaving the house anticipating a torturous campaign through a veritable ocean of consumers, battle scenes from Gladiator and 300 ringing clear in my imagination, we arrived in Derby town centre on the antepenultimate shopping day ’ere Christmas, and bravely headed for the Westfield Centre for the toilet roll and toothpaste we had come in for.

It was empty.

Well, not empty, of course, but compared to my expectation of Glastonbury Festival we were met with Lapland, New Forest. The aisles of Sainsbury’s brought to mind opening scenes of 28 Days Later, there was no problem finding an empty table at our favourite (and normally extremely busy) coffee house, and even the queue for Santa’s Grotto was only about a dozen deep. The wife assures me, in fact, that the centre is often more busy on weekdays than it was today. On the Sunday before the Sunday before Christmas.

If I’m entirely honest, I had been beginning to think, armed with stories others had reported from the High Streets of Watford and London, and with blogs and newspaper reports telling me that the credit crunch was only affecting businesses and hadn’t yet hit consumers. That consumerism was being allowed one last joyous splurge to celebrate the Christmas of a lifetime, and then we’d move into a new age of austerity, prudence and complaining. Possibly, even, that the media might be making mountains from molehills, and we’d come out all right by next year. From today’s (anecdotal) evidence, that seems like wishful thinking.

There are other explanations, of course – that we’ve all been buying things online instead of going in for mad dash shopping runs, or that people have been avoiding crowds by finding time during the week to shop, or even that Derby is the exception, not the rule. Perhaps I’m acting like those ignorant folk who blame global warming when summer temperatures go above 25°C for more than three days in succession. Somehow, though, I just don’t believe any of those. I just have no confidence at all that this recession will be over any time soon.