On the last day of 2006, I happened to be in a chemist’s shop, hovering around while the pharmacist made up a prescription, looking at the marked-down Christmas gift items and wondering if I really needed a leopard-printed vibrating furry box to put my feet into at the end of a hard day.

A FEW MONTHS into 2006, a client and friend was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He had never smoked. He was 46 years of age. He had four children.

THERE are three great things about receiving a cow for Christmas.

The voice came back at the weekend, thank you. And if you were one of the people who telephoned me last week and could hear nothing from my end of the line but heavy breathing, I do apologise.

Frank Luntz, the American pollster, pitched up on RTE One’s The Week in Politics programme last night, to take the political focus group — famously described by Bill Clinton as “a bunch of bull” — to a new and exciting level.

THERE I was last week in Court 5, the traffic offences boutique, clutching my receipt, ready to prove I’d sent €500 to a charity of the judge’s choice after my last visit to his emporium.

This Monday morning, in common with most email users, I will weed my way through offers of shareholding in companies so hot, they’ve doubled in value over the weekend, through offers of prescription painkillers sent in plain wrappers and through promises that my sex life will be vastly improved once I buy the product guaranteed to give me a bigger penis.

THE timing was ironic on many fronts. He died in his sleep, 17 years to the day after the Berlin Wall came down.

We’re a rotten shower. We think about nothing but money. As long as we get bigger and bigger salaries to pay for our SUVs, we don’t give a sugar about climate change.

Alcohol companies are in the business of shareholder value, like every other kind of company.