Head Rambles

Grandad December 23rd, 2006

Why do people buy so much for Christmas?

I guarantee that if you stand in any shopping centre car park today, you will see people pushing trolleys laden down with bread, milk toilet rolls and other essentials.

Nothing wrong with that? But they will have stocked up for a month at least. Who on earth is going to use ten loaves of bread in one day? Who is going to drink five gallons of milk? And is their cooking so bad that they are going to need twenty rolls of toilet paper in one day?

The shops are open on Christmas Eve. They will all be open again two days later, if not sooner. There are mini-markets in petrol stations that are open on Christmas Day. So why all this panic buying?

The last time I did my Christmas shopping in a supermarket, a few years ago, I swore I would never do it again.

I had to circle the car park for half an hour before getting a space.

Then I found that people were literally fighting to get trolleys. They were stalking shoppers as they came out of the shop and grabbing their trolleys virtually before they were empty.

Then I got inside. Oh God!

It took two hours of battling through jammed lanes. People with two trolleys each. The entire town seemed to be in there.

Then it came to checkout time.

Another hour and a half of queuing! I am not joking. The queues were literally the length of the shop. Staff were wandering up and down wearing Santy hats and handing out sweets to us to try to prevent a riot. I got to intimately know the price of every single item in the lane I was in.

And then of course, I had to fight to hold onto my trolley outside until I had unloaded it, as there were ten irate people trying to grab it off me.

Never again.

So what is it all about?

They are buying enough food to last at least a month. Why? Why not just buy for a couple of days and come back after Christmas when the shops are quiet?

And of course there is The Drink. Crates of beer. I have seen one family loading their car with three trolley loads of beer.

I remember one year I was behind a woman who was of the Travelling persuasion. She had a trolley that was groaning under the weight of drink. Gallons of beer and crates of whiskey. There was a child buried under it somewhere. She got to the checkout and I had to laugh. I quote -

“Bless ya luv. I’ll pay for de drink, but could ya spare an old loaf a bread for de child?”

Now I do my shopping on the Internet. He’s due to deliver in a couple of hours. I had to book the delivery slot weeks ago. I ordered a bit more than usual, but that is because we have a bit of a houseful on Christmas Day. So there are a couple of extra cartons of milk, and a few cans of beer for the guests. And of course there is the turkey and ham. Apart from that it isn’t much more than a normal shop.

After all, the shops will all be open on Wednesday.

• Around the village , Rambles
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Grandad December 23rd, 2006

To those of you who have not been watching the news, or reading the papers, Bertie’s Hole is now open.

Bertie’s Hole is a new tunnel that links the port, in the centre of Dublin with the ring motorway. The idea is to remove heavy lorries from our city streets.

So far, so good.

We’ll ignore the trivial little problems, like the fact that it isn’t high enough to take the bigger lorries, or that it floods.

We will look at the logistics.

In their wisdom, the planners drove the tunnel North to link up with the M1 and then the M50 [the ring road].

There is only one major city to the north of Dublin, and that is Belfast.

The other major cites, like Galway, Limerick, Cork, Waterford and Wexford all lie to the west , south west and south.

So any lorry heading for [say] Cork, has to head north ’til it reaches the ring road and then head anti-clockwise all the way around the city to reach the Cork road.

This is a distance of 16 miles, and it includes an expensive toll bridge and a major stretch of motorway that is being rebuilt. In other words, it it very slow and very expensive.

The alternative is to take the direct route through the city, along the quays which involves a bit of traffic, but you miss out on the roadworks and the toll bridge. That is a distance of 7 miles.

If you are heading south to Waterford or Wexford, the difference in the distances is a lot worse

Which route would you take? Which route do you think the lorries are taking?

And the city planners are completely baffled as to why the lorries aren’t using Bertie’s Hole.

“But we built yiz a lovely tunnel. It cost us €750,000,000. Why aren’t you using it? The fellas going to Belfast say it’s great, but the rest of yiz keep driving through the city. Why?”

And the truckers reply with their usual eloquence

“F*ck off. We don’t like the extra distance or the tolls or the motorway delays!”

So the Irish Government does what it always does - it passes a law. From February the 19th, it will be illegal to drive a lorry through the city.

That is when the fun begins…

• On the road
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