Shopping is a terrible chore, not a hobby.

I was in work a few weeks back helping a lady edit her CV and was startled to note that she'd listed shopping under hobbies and interests. I aim to be non judgemental but it's sometimes hard to suppress my true nature, so I judged. I judged harshly. I won't go through all my thoughts about the lady concerned, they tend towards the uncharitable. I will just say I have renamed her The Aubergine and filed her away in my head, under 'Vaguely Absurd Objects'.

Shopping isn't a hobby. It's a chore. There is no pleasure in it, with the possible exception of pet shops and that is only because they have real animals in them. Although after about five minutes of cooing at the animals I get the guilt and feel sorry for them. Imagine being guinea pig in a pet shop and spending your day in a cage with big, silly human faces looming at you and making stupid clicking noises. That is no life at all. It's bad enough being in a shop but being caged and then gawped and clicked at in a shop at must be even worse.

I was once held hostage at a cosmetics counter by a woman who made stupid noises, though mercifully she didn't cage me and I was allowed to go free after agreeing to pay the ransom which entailed purchasing some sort of face primer that I didn't want until the woman told me I had abnormally vast pores and made me feel self conscious. I wonder if pet shops use similar techniques to trap the animals in the cages. Do they sneak up behind kittens and roar 'get in the cage, those stripes make your arse look enormous'? We just don't know.  I googled 'How to start a pet shop' but no information on animal trapping techniques came up in the first results so it's clear there is a cover up of some sort in play.

Of course pet shops aren't the only sort of shops. You also get department stores. The first thing one normally encounters is the cosmetics and perfume bit. This department is staffed mostly by sharks. Naturally they do the sharks up like women, as sharks are not widely regarded as aspirational but as soon as the store shuts the 'women' return to their true shark form and swim about in tanks until their next shift. Rather like the way Princess Michael of Kent turns in to a lizard when no one is looking.

As long as you are in the cosmetics and perfume bit, you must remain in a state of constant wary alertness. One wrong pause to look at a particularly extravagant counter display and BAM! they've got you. A shark-woman will appear and somehow talk you into spending absurd sums of money on things you neither want nor need. Do not make eye contact and move quickly is the best advice I can offer.

The ladies clothing department is less dangerous but a good deal more frustrating. It is generally full of foul tempered men who position themselves in front of the very thing you want to look at. I'd love to be able to blame the patriarchy and issue a clarion call for men to be hurled down a drain but I cannot. It saddens me to report that women bring the men in to the ladies clothing department. I can offer no explanation for the women and their perverse behaviour. At first I thought it was to make the men angry but realised that I had no evidence the men weren't angry before they were brought to the ladies clothing department. I did wonder if it was the grown up version of the teenage girls' practice of taking a larger, plainer friend clothes shopping as a bullying exercise but there's no real evidence to support that either. It could be a punishment or it could be an elaborate wind up. I doubt we will ever know.

There is also a men's clothing department, it's generally quite easy to get round, probably because all the men are 'blouse blocking' in the ladies section. It is quite vexing for me that the least annoying stretch of shop is the one I have the least reason to use but that is the hand life has dealt me. I shan't linger in gents clothing. I am not a shirt blocker.

Moving on, there is usually a household bit and a toy bit. Household is so dreary I can't even be bothered to have an opinion on it. The toy bit is pretty good until some child goes off on one and starts screaming the place down because it wants Lego or Malevolent Frogman Steve. I don't know if Malevolent Frogman Steve exists but my ears were assaulted by a child repeatedly roaring "MALEVOLENT FROOOOGMAN STEEEEEEEVE" in a shop a while back so Steve is real to that child at least.  

You get little shops too. Like ironmongers or hardware shops. These shops tend to exist for many years before announcing they are closing down. When this happens everyone gets upset but fails to see any connection between them doing all their shopping in vast shopping centres and little shops closing down. Sometimes little shops try to entice customers by being friendly and chatty, this is a mistake. When you go down the friendly, chatty route you drive the customers away to the big, impersonal stores where they can shop in peace and instead attract lonely people who haven't received a Christmas card since 1986 and have no money. A valuable service to the wider community but not a profitable one for the shopkeeper.

Probably the shop one encounters most is what they incorrectly call the supermarket. There is very little super about these establishments at all. The idea behind supermarkets is pretty good. What is meant to happen is that you get everything you want under one roof. What actually happens is that you'll get a few things that you want, some inferior versions of some other things you want and then have to go elsewhere for the rest because there is no customer demand for it and you are not a customer but an inconvenient oaf with obscure tastes.

Supermarkets like to pose as our big pal in the community by putting up a public noticeboard where you can view adverts for second hand tricycles, dogs and trumpets. There's no actual evidence these notices are placed by members of the public. Knowing how ruthless supermarkets are, I reckon they would have you shot if you tried to sell a three piece suite or a trombone on their premises. I'd stick to Gumtree, it's not worth the risk, no one can take on the supermarkets. Not even farmers and they are red faced mad men with guns.

I could do all of my shopping online if I hadn't had such a peculiar upbringing. Occasionally as a child I would calmly and reasonably point out that I did not wish to do something, to which my mother invariably responded that life was full of doing things one doesn't want to and that I should just get on with the thing I didn't want to do. Consequently I fear something terrible will befall me if I devote myself to pleasure by doing the online shopping. Then there is the haunting fear that the things you order online are picked and packed by badly paid people on strange shifts in a horrible warehouse and I don't want to put them to any additional trouble.

I suppose I could ask The Aubergine to do my shopping since she enjoys it so much but she strikes me as the type to come back with goose fat when you asked for jam. There is also the whole ethical dimension of taking advantage of an obvious simpleton to consider. Sadly until the Japanese invent a suitably advanced robot or a magic wand I am stuck with the chore NOT the hobby of shopping.