She shook her head regretfully at the grim moral of the story. When she finished work she faced the long and lonely drive home on Houston's freeways. On one occasion a truck driver had harassed her as she drove, swerving towards her car and making sexual gestures He was trying to force her to pull off the road. When she stopped to reload and took her ear-protectors off, I struck up a conversation.

She said she was a nurse in the local emergency room and admitted that she did see something incongruous about a nurse with a gun. Her job frequently consisted of patching up shooting victims. She explained that she did not even like guns, but she needed a little target practice, and the gun had become a necessity. Her hospital shifts usually lasted from 6pm until two in the morning - prime time for treating shooting victims. In America's Lone Star State there was nothing unusual about the scene. Pick-up trucks have gun racks as commonly as air-conditioning Young women carry guns as easily as Gucci handbags. In fancy, upmarket shops you can even buy the ultimate in designer jewellery - diamond-and-ruby-encrusted 9mm pistols But this woman was different She was wearing a hospital blue uniform. She was blasting away at targets at the back of a gun shop on the outskirts of Houston using a LadySmith, a Smith and Wesson revolver designed to fit a small woman's hand.

It is a bleak and empty value system that degrades all of us, rich and poor. Instead we must recognise that the time each of us spends alive on this planet is the only thing we have that has real and spiritual value. We are squandering that time, and, grotesquely, it really is running out now.. The well-off become depressed, while for the poor serious mental illness is becoming a problem in itself.Not all of this is caused by poverty or even by inequality, although both of these problems must be urgently tackled. It is caused by consumerism itself, the idea that everything on the planet can be converted into cash, that work is work only if it is paid for, and pleasure is pleasure only if it is purchased. THE WOMAN was blonde, petite and, as the Texas gun shop owner put it, "packing serious heat". The point is that ordinary people have always taken pride in their gardens, their food, their households, their dress - all without the help of Terence Conran.