Do we just make things worse when we try to make them better?

Like everybody else this weekend, I bought a lottery ticket because the Lottery’s chirrupy PR woman kept popping up on radio programmes to convince me that even if I didn’t win, I’d feel great because I’d be supporting good causes. I filled in two whole sheets of numbers. My birthday figured, as did the birthday of the man in my life. I’d have gone for my son’s birthday too, if I could remember it. I know I was there at the time, and I think it was the last day in January, but I’m never sure of the year and I thought it wouldn’t be good for his self-esteem to be telephoned – by his mother — asking when he was born, just for a lottery ticket. So I used his telephone number instead.

The cashier in the shop fed my two sheets into her machine and asked me for €260. I nearly passed out. I’d figured that two sheets might be a bit expensive, but not THAT expensive. It turned out that I had ticked every available box, including one that committed me to a twice-weekly entry for several months. Rescuing me took three staff members and seriously ticked off the queue of would-be winners behind me (and this was at seven-thirty in the morning).

A little later, in the same shop, one of the women I had delayed got stuck behind me again, while I had a moral qualm.

“Do you MIND?” she asked, reaching past me for a punnet of strawberries.

“Do you MIND?” is one of those internally-contradictory phrases that means “get the hell out of my way, you dozy cow”.

The woman from the queue didn’t appreciate the strawberry problem, which was that the shop had no Irish strawberries because, apparently, Irish strawberries have been drowned or rendered spongiform by the Groundhog Days of rain we’ve been having, and what was on offer was American produce.

Now, where all strawberries have tiny seeds on the outside. American strawberries have particularly sturdy seeds. Eating one gives your teeth the impression the strawberry was rolled in tiny ball bearings before it was let out. America grows the only strawberries you have to peel, apple-fashion, before they’re edible. They qualify as soft fruit only when you’ve taken off their outer armour.

The moral issue, however, was the carbon footprint of these Yank strawberries. Moral eating now follows the property rule: location, location, location. If you eat anything grown more than sixty miles from where you stand, you go to hell or cause a flood in Bangladesh. Which renders the proposed closure of Chivers jam factory in Dublin, announced this weekend, environmentally-relevant. In business terms, centralising the production of jam may make sense. But does it mean that soft fruit from Ireland will now be freighted across to the English factory and the consequent jam freighted back, ensuring that if you put a dab of Chivers on your morning toast, you make an oversized contribution to climate change because the fruit involved did so much travel? Should the economy-of-scale argument outweigh the produce-locally imperative?

It’s got to the stage where you wouldn’t know what to boycott. If you want to buy chicken fillets, it’s simple enough. An Irish brand means this chicken hasn’t done a marathon journey with tons of fuel used to keep it cool en route before it ends up on your barbeque. But an UNbranded chicken fillet could come from Wales or Warsaw, since EU labelling prohibits country-of-origin statements. And not many Romanian chickens buy carbon offsets to compensate for the damage they do to the environment getting here.

On the topic of carbon offset, would someone mind telling me why it’s legal to sell leaf-blowers, which use enormous amounts of petrol, polluting the atmosphere for several square kilometres, to disarrange fallen foliage which cries out for a sweeping brush, a rake and a bag? We have Sustainable Energy Ireland broadcasting ads with a gormless old geezer patting himself on the back for turning out the light bulb in the garage when he’s not out there, while at the same time every Woodies-type DIY store flogs enormous patio heaters designed to use fossil fuel to heat the great outdoors. What’s wrong with this picture?

Moral shopping, of course, means more than environmentally-friendly shopping. In the clothing departments, the dilemma is: Do you buy that cheapo shirt or was it made in a sweatshop in Indonesia, and even if it WAS made in an Indonesian sweatshop, how will the Indonesian sweatshop workers You probably can’t — in this country — buy pharmaceuticals that originate in China, which is just as well, since recent scandals indicate that your discount Amoxycillin might be equal parts antibiotic and antifreeze. But you may find bags and other disposables with the ‘Made in China’ label on them, in which case you can refuse to buy until they get their human rights act together, or you purchase in the belief that brisk and open trade is one of the most effective ways of changing bad practices in countries, whereas economic isolation has always tended to be joined at the hip with dictatorship and repression.

In the old days, it was just as confusing, but at a different level. You couldn’t eat Outspan oranges, because they came from South Africa, where apartheid reigned. You couldn’t buy Spring Books, even though the imprint did great anthologies for children at half nothing prices, because they were printed by brainwashed priests in Czechoslovakia. Or so my mother maintained. As a kid, it was never clear to me why the communist Czech government would want to brainwash priests, particularly, and channel them thereafter into the printing trade, but I knew that publisher’s books were banned.

We didn’t buy anything Made in China, either, partly because Communist China had been horrible to the Columban Fathers, and one of my uncles was a Columban, and partly because anything bearing that label was junk. We were ambivalent about Taiwan. My mother thought the stuff was rubbish but the Taiwanese weren’t communists, whereas my father thought they were unreconstructed runaway fascists who should not be supported under any circumstances.

Anything Swiss was good, on the other hand, because the Swiss produced Heidi and the ribbon-uniformed lads that guarded the Pope and never did any no harm to anyone, avalanches being an act of God. The only problem was that other than chocolate and cuckoo clocks, they didn’t manufacture that much, and there’s a limit to the number of cuckoo clocks any one house can sustain. More recently, of course, they started to make those knives that allow you to take stones out of horses’ hooves and change the wheel on a hearse, should you need to.

It’s just as well nobody won the ten million in the Lottery. Spending it would have been a conscience-crippler.