How Not to Shop Local

I’ve just been to the Coop. Local shops are dangerous places for the recently dumped. Not only does excessive chocolate, beer and Pritt Stick (there are worse ways of sticking a relationship back together) buying go on, but you meet people. Who know. Who ask how you are. Who sympathise with sympathetic faces.

Now, mostly, I’m fine. I have done the hiding in the cupboard thing, I have had many a romantic evening in by myself. I have slept. A lot. I have vowed to give up lusting after lost loves, longing for babies, missing cats and wondering why the house is so tidy.

The problem comes only when some bastard person sympathises. Then I crack. In the Coop. The staff of the Coop are definitely on the verge of banning me from the premises. Frankly, I’m giving a bad impression of local shopping. A great deal of expense, time and poor planning have just gone into refurbishing this enchanting emporium. The shoppers should now skip around the newly-narrowed and confusingly laid-out retail outlet in veritable paroxysms of delight. Which they would. If it weren’t for the middle-aged women sobbing on relative strangers’ shoulders in the aisles.

I do, however, have a solution. I’m going to get a tattoo. This is a very cunning plan as a tattoo will achieve a number of necessary goals in one fell swoop, or one fell tattoo:
Fulfil the need for self-harm that many a rejected soul feels the need to accomplish.
Fulfil the need for improved body image that many a rejected soul needs.
Fill at least an hour of time where thinking about anything else aside from pain will be unnecessary.
Fulfil the need for something (anything) that actually lasts a life time.
Be green.
Stop people sympathising with me as it is going to read ‘DON’T TALK TO ME’ in large letters across my forehead.

Cunning eh?