Wed 24th June 2009

A colleague and I moved into a new office today. To celebrate the occasion, I went out to the £1 shop to buy essential provisions – two new tacky mugs for our tea. For myself, I bought a mug emblazoned with a “Carry On Matron” film poster. For my colleague, I bought a spectacularly tacky Elvis mug. Oh the smug glee of the condescending middle classes – ho ho ho.

I made my way to the checkout to be greeted by a woman with bobbed black hair. She looked at the mugs for a moment, before pointing at a sticker on them I had not previously noticed. It said “Buy 2 get one free”.

“You’ll have to pick another one if you wanna get one free” she announced.

I could have used my expert pedantry to deconstruct the vague language used on the sticker, by pointing out that the offer technically implied that if I bought two, one of them should be free. I could have helpfully advised that if it was necessary to buy 2 before taking advantage of a free mug offer, then surely the sticker would be less ambiguous if it were to say something like, “Buy 2 mugs and get a third free”. But I opted against doing this for 2 main reasons:-

1) This was a pound shop, so I did not want to look particularly miserly by trying to barter with products already priced at a mere £1 each.
2) I appreciated her seemingly genuine concern that I fully obliged my purchase offer, so it didn’t seem fair to inconvenience her with my linguistic pedantry.

I headed back to select another mug (this one had a baby wearing headphones – lovely!), and wandered back to the girl at the till. She looked at the three mugs, and looked at me. Then all of sudden, with no prompt or warning, she brazenly announced, “You don’t live with a woman do you?”

Well, as you can imagine, I was rather taken aback by this. How on Earth could she possibly know such a personal thing about me? This deduction was so unprecedented that I began to wonder if this humble pound-shop worker actually had some sort of special gift. Maybe she had some psychic powers. She certainly had a bit of the Mystic Meg look about her. And thinking about it, you don’t actually see that much of Mystic Meg nowadays, do you? Could it be that old Meg has fallen on such hard times, she is now trying to make ends meet by supplementing her wages with a till job at Wolverhampton Poundland? Of course not. If she really knew what I was thinking, (following her very vocal and public presumptions on my lifestyle) it is very unlikely she’d have been willing to serve me at all.

So for what other reason would she assume I did not live with a woman? Could she be implying that I am gay? Or that I am so grotesquely ugly I couldn’t possibly procure the affections of the opposite sex? Well – no. It transpired the reason she made this bold assumption was, in her words, “because none of the mugs matched each other, and a woman wouldn’t have allowed that.”

So there you go ladies - I’ve learned something new about wooing your affections today. How could I have been so foolish for so long? It was so obvious! Apparently you do not want a man with one tacky “Carry On Matron” mug, but a man with whole series of identical “Carry On Matron” mugs. From now on I will win your hearts, proving how I have tamed myself from chaos to a settled, ordered world. After all, no woman in their right mind could possibly love a maverick with arbitrary drinking vessels.

By the way, in case you were wondering, I am being sarcastic. I did not believe for one second that gender politics have reached such base levels of caricature. But in that checkout girl’s world, clearly they had. And so as not to disappoint, I humoured her stereotyped world-view of hapless blundering men, by accidentally leaving a foul anal mist with her at the check-out.