I ADMIT it, I’m a convert. And like any new convert, I’m desperate to tell everyone how wonderful life now is and make redress for the time I previously spent in darkness.

My conversion was a consumer one – I have just discovered the delights of internet grocery shopping and life will never the same again.

It’s fantastic. One evening, my son Ollie and I sit down in front of the computer together and do the week’s shopping.

Together we work out what we want and he enters it into the search system.

His spelling of items such as ketchup, bleach and low fat bio yogurt is improving by leaps and bounds.

And it’s so much easier to drag a nine-year-old round a computer than it is a supermarket.

The next evening, it arrives, delivered with a smile to the kitchen. Magic.

OK, we’ve had a few teething problems.

I wasn’t quite sure how much 340g of Rice Krispies would look like –the multi buy seemed like a bargain. So that’s our breakfast cereal sorted for at least a year.

And the first time I used the website I could have walked to the supermarket and back in the time it took me to complete an online order. But now I’m a convert.

I confess that don’t really get shopping as a leisure activity.

Black Friday came as a graphic reminder of how awful it can get.

Queues formed the night before. By 5am police were being called to restore order. Customers were so desperate to get a cut-price TV that they fought each other ‘like animals’. £2m was spent, every minute of every hour for nine hours of trading.

Of course the real fallacy of all of this shopping is that the satisfaction is as short-lived as a grocery shop. The TV that is the object of desire today is obsolete by the time you get it home. Next year we’ll want a bigger one, with a curved screen, showing things in more colours and with greater 3D definition than our eyes can possibly see.

So good then to find myself part of quite a different queue on Saturday.

This time for the Cathedral’s Darkness to Light Advent Service.

An hour of peace, of inspirational words and music, of beauty and of stillness.

And a timely reminder that we may need to fill our lives with things that we can’t buy cut price in the shops if we are to discover peace and stillness that will carry us beyond the coming festive season.

Martin Field