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?