last-minute gifts, you may well be ready for a more pleasant shopping experience. According to Ian Reeves , the wonders of technology can help get all your shopping done without you leaving the comfort of home. And it doesn't mean limiting yourself to mail order catalogues. In fact, there are a variety of options that can save you the hassle of Hamilton. So if you're agoraphobic, lazy, or just a bit chilly, here are the possibilities: If your house is equipped with satellite, you could always tune in to the Home Shopping Network. There, the ever-smiling presenters talk in elaborate detail about the various advantages of the latest wares. The main problem here is you may have to watch for hours before something you're interested in shows up. And although the shows can be surprisingly entertaining, you may not want to be glued to the set for that long. For more control, those of us with computers can turn to the Internet for deliverance from real-life shopping hell. Most retailers worth their salt already have a `site' on the worldwide web, colourful computerised pages which users can search through for goods that they're interested in. Theoretically, they can also place an order, pay with their credit card, and sit back and await delivery to their home. And just as retailers' actual shops will often be clustered together in shopping centres, so it is on the Internet, where a series of `virtual shopping malls' means that you don't have to go hunting far and wide for the shop you want.

Depending on who you're listening to, the Internet will either be the sole reason for a massive boom in home shopping, or a flash in the pan which sounds good in principle but never really works out practically. In the United Kingdom, the statistics tell a confusing story. UK Shopping City, an Internet `virtual shopping' site, was receiving more than 33,000 visits per day in the week running up to last Christmas. But that's not to say that any of them actually bought anything. Just down the virtual road at Barclay Square, the biggest and slickest of the places to shop on the Internet, Argos had sold a staggeringly unimpressive 22 items by September of this year. The main problem is that the use of credit cards as payment was, and is, still extremely limited. Nobody feels really confident that after tapping in their credit card details some cunning computer hacker isn't going to intercept them and give them a very unhappy New Year indeed. But still the Internet shopping market this year is expected to reach 55 million in the United Kingdom, although that's a small fraction of the total home shopping market -- including mail order catalogues -- which currently stands at 6,000 million. And a survey by international consultants Healey and Baker reckons consumer spending on the Internet in the UK could be worth 7.35 billion -- five percent of the total of all spending -- within five years. Which should mean that by Christmas Eve, usually-packed stores will be nicely deserted so that I can have my last-minute buying panic in peace.