A great night for shopping at Liberty

The Independent readers' exclusive Christmas shopping event at Liberty promises to be both a pleasant and a productive evening for everyone who attends.

It is an opportunity to buy beautiful presents in the attractive surroundings of Britain's most civilised store, away from the hectic Christmas crush.

But for one ticket-holder, there will be all that and something more. All the tickets for the shopping evening, between 6pm and 8.30pm on Wednesday 1 December at 17 Liberty stores around the country, will be entered in a prize draw. And somebody - it could be you - is going to win a pounds 1,000 Liberty voucher in that draw.

Which is yet another very good reason for filling in the application form and sending it off straight away to: Liberty Evening, PO Box 175, Carshalton, Surrey SM5 2WA.

Last Saturday we listed the free tastings, great special offers and entertainments - including music from a string quartet, a gospel choir and a jazz vocal group - which will add to the pleasure at Liberty's Regent Street store in the West End of London.

Among the attractions are cookery, aromatherapy and skin-care demonstrations, tastings of whisky, wine and waters, and a wide range of free gifts with purchases from Nicole Farhi, Ralph Lauren, Kenzo and Bella Freud.

Best of all, for every pounds 50 spent in the store there will be a free Liberty gift voucher worth pounds 5.

This week Liberty has added even more gifts (including raffle prizes in the perfumery department), more personal appearances (among them one by Georgina von Etzdorf, the fabric designer, in the Scarf Department), and will also open up a 20th- century gold rings exhibition staged by the World Gold Council in the Regent Street store. And more of the regular contributors to the Weekend section will be coming along in the evening: Emily Green, our restaurant critic, Anthony Rose, wine correspondent (who will be signing copies of his new book, Grapevine), and Anne Spackman, property writer, will join Anna Pavord, Jonathan Glancey, John Windsor and Sophie Grigson. Frank Barrett, the Independent's travel correspondent, will be at the Bath store. Outside London, 16 other Liberty stores are also offering exclusive shopping evenings for Independent readers, and tickets for those events will be included in the pounds 1,000 prize draw.

But there is a catch, of course, to all this. Numbers are limited, and last year's Christmas shopping evenings were fully booked. So if you do not apply soon for a ticket (which admits two people), you could miss out on a delightful evening's shopping and a pounds 1,000 prize.