Shopping? Yeah, fat chance

I’m not a shopper – only for one reason: I hate shopping. For one thing, it would interfere with my obsession for news. I love news -24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If it’s happened anywhere in the world, I need to know about it immediately.

This summer, I even tipped off the editor of the Sun that the ISIS flag was flying that night above an East London housing estate… and I was in Corsica. When I get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, my BlackBerry comes with me.

Three minutes later, I’m back in bed knowing everything from the Tokyo Stock exchange share prices, to the latest exploits of Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. And all while still asleep.

But getting back to the business of shopping. What were the chances of my meeting and marrying a woman who also hated to shop as much as I did?

It happened to me.

We were clearly a match made for each other in non-shopping heaven. The woman had to be forced to shop at gun point!

Perhaps I should have spotted this immediately, as the first time we met she was wearing a pair of bright red clown’s pantaloons held up just below her neck by braces over a striped blue and white t-shirt.

Last week, I was forced to go shopping as my suits were so shiny that they were blinding oncoming drivers. I’d already caused two minor accidents in St John’s Wood High Street

Like all salesman, I’m easy to sell to. It’s just the having to go into shops part of shopping that I don’t like.

“Sir, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong department,” the department store salesman said when I asked to see a dark blue suit.

“You want our portly men’s department.”

“I’m sorry – what did you say?” I asked.

“I said, you’ll need to visit our portly men’s department, sir.”

“Your portly men’s department!? Why don’t you just get off the fence and call it your fat bastards department? Let me tell you something – I desperately need three non-shiny suits… but if your suits were the last suits in the whole world, I wouldn’t buy it from you. You’re the world’s worst salesman.”

So, if you get dazzled one night during these long winter months by an oncoming, portly, middle-aged driver wearing a shiny blue suit in St Johns Wood High Street, that’ll be me heading straight towards you.