How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [57]
Now we get to the question of price tags.
And I’m talking to you now, Mr Tiffany.
I walked into your Bond Street shop the other day, took one look at the counter full of jewellery, noticed that nothing had a price tag and promptly walked out again.
This is because I knew exactly what would happen if I hung around. I’d point at a brooch. The sales assistant would get it out of the cabinet. I’d have to ask how much it cost and she’d say, through a loudhailer so everyone in the shop could hear, ‘£250,000.’ And I’d then have to shrug and try to look nonchalant, which is jolly difficult when your knees are knocking. I buy jewellery like wine, on price. It is the only thing I want to know. I don’t care about the setting or where the diamond came from. I just want to know whether it costs 5p or £800m. Knowing this speeds up the transaction and saves me from embarrassment, and any jeweller who doesn’t realize this has only himself to blame when the bailiffs drop round for tea and buns.
Retailers should also know that men can only ever buy what they want ‘now’. It is why, whenever I’m sent to a supermarket to do the weekly shop, I only ever buy what I want at that precise moment. So instead of getting six bumper packs of bog roll and four trays of dog food, I come home with one tube of Smarties. I am allergic to buying a bumper pack of anything. When I need a shave I only need one razor. When I want lunch I want one pizza. So sell them singly, please. And while we’re at it, Dolmio, smaller pots, if you wouldn’t mind.
Finally, and I hope this is helpful, pretty girls cost the same to employ as ugly ones.
There’s a shop in St James’s Street, London, called Swaine Adeney Brigg that sells lilac riding crops for £900. I have no use for anything like that but I buy one a week because the assistant is so pretty. In short, nobody likes to be served by a boot-faced crow. Or, and this is for you, PC World, a man in a purple shirt.
That is the end of my column and if retailers pay no attention to it, it will be the end of their shops as well. The rest of you have a happy new year and for heaven’s sake enjoy it. It might be your last.
Sunday 28 December 2008
Ring a ring o’ clipboards – we all fall down
When I was a keen young reporter on a local newspaper, I was dispatched to the council house of a young woman who’d called and said her home had been overrun by cockroaches.
Home turned out to be the wrong word. It was a structure of sorts containing nothing but upturned boxes and several children who looked like they’d walked straight off the set of Kes. As we tried to sort out a family picture, it transpired that the woman had absolutely no idea which kids were hers and which ones belonged to what I’d taken until that point to be a puddle of lard but was in fact her sister. Nor did she have the first clue what cockroaches were. ‘You know what they do?’ she said. ‘They burrow into kiddies’ heads, lay their eggs and the kiddies end up with a head full of spiders.’
That was thirty years ago, and you might imagine things on the sink estates of grim northern towns were much better these days. But no. Over the Christmas holidays we read about the Mansfield couple who went on a seven-hour drinking binge with their sick-encrusted baby. The father was an extraordinary-looking creature who appeared to be part mouse, part pipe cleaner, and the mother had six previous drunk-and-disorderly convictions. Plainly, then, they are entirely unsuitable parents, and unless the social services continue to keep a close eye, their poor child will wake up one day in a box under a bed and it’ll be Shannon Matthews all over again.
I was therefore delighted to read last week that the government is going to take action to make life that little bit better for the children of this great nation. However, it is not talking about increasing its vigilance on children who are made to eat only what they can find in the heroin-laced stairwells of the tower blocks in which they live, or those who are sent out to exchange stolen