Jamie Ross: Tesco Girl

This isn’t the kind of sentence I get to write very often, as the combining factors of my ramshackle appearance and my general fear of people under thirty years of age has ensured that girls only enter a conversation with me either by necessity or mistake.

This girl falls into the first category. As an employee of Tesco, she is contractually-obliged to, at the very least, try her hardest to disguise any physical revulsion she experiences upon encountering a paying customer. An irresistible combination of beauty and basic, paid-for courtesy has enraptured my heart and I don’t care who knows it.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. In the past, I’ve attempted to smile at waitresses with so much uncertain timidity that I actually provide nothing more than a snaggletoothed grimace. Then there are female Topman employees who, with a compliment and a smile, could persuade me to wear a church lightening rod as a hat during a hurricane. But there’s something different about Tesco Girl.

 I first noticed her at the start of term when our eyes met over my discounted jar of curry sauce. I quickly realised that there are few things less sexy than a thrifty man who spends his life shovelling fistfuls of curry into his face so, ever since then, I have carefully co-ordinated my shopping in an attempt to reflect the more positive aspects of my personality.

First of all, to neutralise her possible fears over my lust for curry, I started off by making sure I always bought mints along with whatever else I was purchasing. The very foundation level of being attractive to anybody is making sure that your mouth doesn’t smell like an all-devouring portal to Hell, and I smugly believe I have side-stepped that particular trap with commendable finesse.

More recently, I have expanded this tactical shopping – yes, I could have written tic-tacal shopping there and some people might have found it funny but, ideally, I want the kind of people who find puns funny to be as miserable as possible – to include items with more complex messages.

For example, I have decided that a chocolate-coated granola bar says ‘this man looks after himself, but isn’t afraid to let his hair down occasionally.’ I have concluded that grape juice makes her think ‘this man is packed-full of antioxidants; he will probably be alive to care for me in my old age.’ However, I’m running low on ideas for this, so please do provide suggestions below the column for what else I could buy to impress her. Ideally, you will suggest something more fulfilling than a granola bar and grape juice as, at the time of writing, I am slowly dying of malnutrition.

Anyway, buying superfluous groceries is all fine and well, but the next stage is where it gets tricky. Some of my friends have urged me to ask her out, but that is almost certainly because most of the people I know revel in my failures. There is no way I will ever talk to her with a queue of students behind me, clutching their Apple Sourz and their condoms, waiting to incorporate my name into an unflattering chant.

So here I will, most likely, remain. Selectively buying products I neither want nor need to try and impress an almost certainly indifferent woman. Whoever claimed that this is a matchmaking university was talking out of their bollocks.