I’M RARELY stunned into silence, but it happened last week.
You see, I find it difficult to compute how anyone could possibly find shopping a miserable experience and yet I now know that those people do exist.
It emerged over the course of an innocent conversation that boyfriend had not purchased a new winter coat in ten years.
Yes, ten years.
Ten full years.
He is 31.
That means if you get your calculator out – but don’t bother, because I have already kindly done the maths for you – that he last bought a winter coat aged 21 in 2001.
I know, I know, it is almost impossible to fathom, but it is the truth.
Obviously, this sent me into a spiral of disbelief. I could barely take the information in.
Thankfully, once I had taken this in, I came up with a wonderful plan, a plan which would bring us closer together, I thought: we would both go shopping for his winter coat.
It was going to be a wonderful experience, it was going to be all cold and Christmassy and cosy.
We were going to drink hot chocolate (even though I don’t like it) and we were going to laugh and perhaps hum a festive ditty as we strolled about town.
We might pick ourselves up a spot of lunch, a salad for me of course (cough, splutter) and generally, in my head, it was going to be a really lovely experience.
What I failed to do was factor my significant other into this dream sequence. There is a reason he had not bought a winter coat in ten years, a real reason.
Specialising, as I do, in badgering, I made sure to repeatedly hound him until he agreed to go shopping with me.
The amount of effort it took to get him to agree should have been a warning sign, but I chose to ignore it.
Instead, I insisted we spend a Sunday afternoon doing the thing I now clearly realise he hates the most – shopping.
We began our journey in a shopping centre, where worryingly I was given cause to believe I may suffer from small bladder syndrome. This is because I paid a visit to the loo and there was a rather intimidating sign on the door asking me: “Do you plan your shopping around visits to the loo?”
“I do, I really do,” I replied in my head.
I then spent the remainder of the day counting the times I ran to the loo (for those interested, it was a signifi cant amount).
Luckily, if the intimidating poster is to be believed, there is a cure – which I shall no doubt investigate at a later stage.
Moving on, boyfriend and I walked into John Lewis, a department store which sports an incredibly large selection of menswear.
I was feeling confident.
“We’ll almost certainly find a coat immediately,” I thought. If I’m being honest, I had just presumed he would do what I told him to do. I really had not anticipated the incoming difficulty.
“Try this” I suggested.
“No,” came the reply.
“Oh right, why?” I asked.
“It’s got weird buttons. Why are there anchors on those buttons? It is ridiculous.”
“Hmmmm, okay, maybe try this instead?”
“No.”
“Em, why?”
“It’s got zips. Why are those zips there? They are completely unnecessary.”
This was my first hint that I was in for a difficult journey.
I quickly learned that designers’ efforts to make their clothing look unique was unappreciated by boyfriend.
“Everything looks the same,” he muttered as he mooched around the store, shoulders hunched and hands in pockets.
I did not bother to explain that no, in fact, everything did not look the same; there were very fine and minute differences in each coat which his untrained eye could not see. If I heard “no” once, I heard it one hundred times.
There was a particularly nasty incident in one store which led to him storming out, only to re-enter, then storm out again and re-enter minutes later.
This was because it contained the only coat he liked, but he could not bring himself to actually spend the money on it.
The shop assistant stationed at the door gave me a few sympathetic nods; he had seen this all before.
Eventually, after five hours, five full hours – he purchased a coat. It was actually one of the first coats he had tried on, but I didn’t bother to tell him that.
I don’t care if it is another ten years before he buys another coat because I certainly won’t be going with him again.