Archive for September 24th, 2009

French prices

September 24th, 2009

I received an email from Superquinn yesterday.

They are offering specials on French wines.  Hah!

We did a little shopping today, but I decided to forgo Superquinn’s offer, as I doubt they deliver here.

I bought some Royal Gala apples.

Superquinn are charging €0.49 each.  To be fair, I looked at Tescos – €0.43 each.  Here in France?  €0.21, and they are lovely, crisp sweet, juicy, big ones too.

I thought about some wine.

A nice bottle of Rose d’Anjou will set you back €9.55 in Superquinn.   Tescos charge €7.79, which doesn’t say much for Superquinn’s sale?  French price?  Wait for it……  €1.89.  Hah!

Ah, but be fair, says you.  Isn’t France a wine producer?  That’s true, but it is still one hell of a mark-up, at four to five times the price.  And Ireland is quite capable of growing its own apples so there should be little or no difference there?

OK, so.  Ireland is a dairy farming country.  How about milk?

Tecos – €1.14 a litre.  Superquinn – €1.15 a litre.  France?  €0.78 a litre.

In fairness there were one or two items that were slightly more expensive here.

Tescos and Superquinn both charge €0.85 for their cheapest sugars, whereas in France I paid €1.42.  But then the French tend to buy in bulk and I probably could have come nearer the Irish price if I had bought one of their more usual sacks that look like they should be delivered to a building site.

On average prices varied from equal to around a half of Irish prices.  Some [like sugar] are higher but they are a rarity.

One price difference I find quite horrifying is pipe tobacco.

I will be honest and say I don’t know how much a pouch is in Ireland, because I tend to buy in bulk, and anyway they keep fucking around with the price [always upwards, of course].  It is somewhere around €6 to €7, if not more.  The price here?  €6.20.  And before any of you say ‘so what?’ – the pouches here are twice the size of the Irish ones.  And the tobacco is imported, so you can’t use that excuse.

The only thing that used to be expensive here was petrol.  Last year it was around 50% higher.  Irish petrol prices have been up and down like a whore’s knickers recently, but petrol here is around €0.10 a litre dearer which isn’t too bad.

And I dare say our forthcoming budget will sort that! 

Another threat to life

September 24th, 2009

I just love my good friend Luke Clancy.

For those of you who don’t know him, he is one of the leading lights in Ireland’s very own Third Reich – ASH.

Now why should I be so happy about someone whose stated aim is to ban all tobacco products?

The answer is simple.

By studying his methodology and the way that he obtains statistics, it makes our job in WANK [Warning Against Natural Killers] so much easier.

For example, his is vomiting forth yet again on the subject of smoking in Ireland and amongst his claims is the one that smoking kills 6,000 people a year.  What he actually claims is that “tobacco is linked with about 6,000 deaths in Ireland each year”, but in his own inimitable cute fashion, he conjures up visions of smokers coughing their lungs up until they expire.

Of course the truth is significantly different.  What he is referring to is the number of people who die each year of illnesses that are associated with smoking.  This means that a non-smoker who unfortunately dies of cancer is lumped in with those figures.  Also, he fails to mention what age they are when they die?

So, you see that makes WANK’s work so much easier.

Lately we have been carrying out some more research [using Clancy’s methodology, of course] and have come up with an incredibly startling result -

At considerable expense, we have studied over ten thousand people who lived between 1900 and 2000, and the result of our study shocked even us.  Every single person in the study walked at some stage, and now they are all dead.  There can be only one horrific conclusion to be drawn.

Walking is fatal.

Of course we are going to put considerable pressure on the government to curtail this horrific blight on society.

  • Footpaths must be torn up immediately.
  • A massive tax must be placed immediately on walking boots to dissuade the young from starting.
  • All posters, photographs and films of people walking must be eradicated.
  • Pedestrians must be treated with the utmost contempt and must be shunned by society.
  • Young people must be educated and taught that walking is only for the weak willed.
  • All footwear must contain a graphic image of a bunion.

So there you have it.

ASH can’t be wrong, so nor can we.

You have been warned.