SHARES have hit a seven-year low, which isn't likely to be good news for anyone.

But how easy it is to resent the obsession with shares and money markets, especially when it all turns out to be our fault.

Bill Moyles, director general of the British Retail Consortium, was quoted on the front page of a national newspaper in a report about slip-sliding shares, which this week hit a seven-year low. He said: "The retail boom is clearly over. Consumer sentiment is weak and the industry needs positive moves from the Chancellor to stimulate demand."

What caught my eye was the phrase "consumer sentiment". At a weary glance, there seemed to be no sane reason to park these two words next to each other. What has sentiment got to do with spending? The first two dictionary definitions I found backed up this suspicion, summing up sentiment as "mental feeling" and "the sum of what one feels on some subject". Then a third definition swam into view: "the tendency to be swayed by feeling rather than reason".

So this is what Mr Moyles was getting at: silly consumers were letting feeling rather than reason determine what they spent at the shops. They - or, rather, we, because we are all consumers these days - were allowing feelings of panic about looming war, dearer petrol prices and rises in council tax and national insurance get in the way of reason, or a good spending spree on the high street, as it is now known.

So here is the new definition of reason: parting with money. I don't know about you, but sometimes I tire of being a consumer and all the spending this unsought role involves.

Occasionally I feel like shouting: "I'm a person not a consumer"; but I don't, probably because I am standing in some wretched queue or other at the time.

Most of us like to spend money when we have it and often when we don't, thanks to the ease of plastic money, with offers of new cards dropping through the letterbox every other day. Everywhere we go we are bombarded with special offers and inducements to dispense our cash.

And now the boss of the British Retail Consortium is blaming our misguided sentiment, and urging us all to head back into the shops. So off we go, muttering all the while that motto of the modern consumer: "All's well that spends well".

This week's column is not a manifesto against spending, far from it. I am happy to spend when there is free cash, so long as it hasn't already been frittered away on children's shoes, music lessons and dance classes, trolley-loads of food and the like. It's just that we live in such febrile times. If the money doesn't sneeze out of our wallets, the whole economy catches a cold. And then it is all our fault for not spending enough.

Well, I've got a pound in my pocket, maybe even two, so you'll just have to excuse me while I pop out and save the great British economy.

GARETH Gates, of all people, is covering Spirit In The Sky, the late Sixties anthem that earned Norman Greenbaum a place in the one-hit-wonder hall of musical fame. But what a song the original remains, as charmingly fuzzy and weird today as it was then.

This track provided the soundtrack to the earliest teenage parties I went to: boys one side of the room, girls the other.

The music moved on, and with it the segregation.

Soon no one, not even poor, mixed-up spiritual Norman, could keep us apart.

Updated: 11:09 Thursday, March 13, 2003