Dip me in chocolate and put me in the sales

There are two types of lesbian- shopping ones, like me, and non-shopping ones and we tend to pair up with the opposite- apropos the laws of attraction and then sheer practical feasibility.

My other half has to be virtually abducted and taken to changing rooms against her will. January sales for her are akin perhaps to unblocking a sink- practical and good once done maybe, but unpleasant. For me, an empty changing room and a pile of affordable bargains is like winning one of Willy Wonka's Golden tickets and then discovering that Angelina Jolie likes to bathe naked in the chocolate river.

I literally salivate, with the conditioning of a Pavlovian dog at the sight of those red tickets. Nurture rather than nature, by extrapolation, would be the origins of my desire for marked down goods and my faulty logic, whereby I save when I spend. My subconscious is multilingual: as well as Sale, it responds to Salg and Solde (sale means dirty in French, maybe my partner has a point, but then salé means salty and therefore sexy: Ms Jolie swims back into view). I know I'm mixing my nature and my nurture here, but oestrogen and adrenalin is a heady mix.

Now here's the gender-bending crux of it: for me, finding a reduced T-shirt, dragging it to the changing room, with all the frenzied stripping that ensues and carrying it home has a faint Neanderthal resonance somehow: I want to parade around with my trophy yelping "mine all mine". This is a primeval throwback and explains the wild look some women can get at the end of a season. After all, what is shopping if not hunter-gathering?

Lesbian tongue in cheek

I spent the day unsuccessfully flailing in a variety of tasks. I am a terrible multitasker: I think when I was programmed as gay in the womb, multitasking sort of fell off one of my X chromosomes, along with the ability to walk in heels. I find it somehow disconcerting to feel as if I am walking downhill when I am in fact doing otherwise. (Perhaps there is a deeper metaphysical fear within this.)

Of course, while eschewing many gender roles, I cling to some of the female prerogatives conferred at birth by my extra X nevertheless. These include the "it is a woman's prerogative to change her mind" clause, along with the "I may cry over spilt milk and gorge myself on chocolate on the first day of my period" clause, and the "when something is half price I therefore save that amount instead of spending it" logic. In fact, as a Libran, indecision is a quality I take something approaching defiant pride in. Also, being in a gay relationship means by extrapolation that I am going out with another womb-bearer, who knows when comfort and cocoa is craved.

All of these typecast stereotypes can serve one well, if used sufficiently sparingly. The other proviso being that unwelcome stereotypes are not thrust upon one; should that be the case I would not be myself and instead be a mere approximation of a "representative" group of people, and really- mathematically speaking- who wants to be average now?