The day before Remembrance Sunday the people in Oxford Street told themselves to remember there were fewer than 50 shopping days until Christmas. Even in our down times, London is a formidable shopping Mecca: the people who weren’t in Oxford Street that day were possibly at the new Westfield Stratford City, a shopping mall the size of a small invadeable country, where even the security guards were impressed by the military effort being put into the laying of a red carpet for the premiere of the movie The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part One, for which fans, or Twihards, as we fans like to say, started queuing three days early. In the event, the movie’s female lead, Kristen Stewart, posed, according to Metro, ‘for red carpet photos wearing high heels with her sparkling black Roberto Cavalli dress and McQueen belt but changed into comfortable blue trainers before signing autographs’.

LRB 1 December 2011 | PDF Download