Yesterday I needed to buy batteries for a toy that Santa made a mistake when he visited on Christmas Eve, silly Santa.

As it was St. Stephens Day I knew that there would be very few shops open but felt confident that the local petrol station would be open, so I drove to the village. On my way I noticed a ViVo convienence store open and as parking would easier I decided to go in. I located the batteries with the price of €5 per battery attached to it and said "that pricey" but I needed the batteries. I asked the girl for 2 batteries and as she scanned them through the Epos a price of €5.49 came up. I protested and said the price is €5 to which she voided the first transaction and charged me €10 for the two batteries. I was annoyed but went home, when I got home I noticed that the €5 sticker was covering the original price sticker of €4.35 (they did'nt even have the brains to remove the old one) 

So not only did the shop increase the price by 65c it attempted to extort another 49c on top. That's a total of €1.14 or 26.2% of extortion on top of the large margin that batteries would attract anyway. It never fails to amaze me that these so called business men and women appear to be more intent on short term gain as opposed to ensuring that customers will come back time and time again to help secure the future of their business. That ViVo has lost me forever as I will never use it again. Additionally we as customers need to pay more attention to what is going on when we buy goods as I have a feeling that this practise is not confined to Christmas.

Another thing why do batteries have best before dates now? the ones I bought had a 2013 date, but they'll be long dead before that.

Christmas is a time for magic and wonder. It is also a time for staying in an watching a lot of telly, something that I do very well.Christmas night we were all sitting down watching the telly when Eastenders came on, now I have never seen more than a few minutes of this but other members of my family like so I did'nt flick.

After about 10 minutes I could'nt watch anymore so I went to make a cup of tea and allow the others enjoy the programme. I re-entered the lounge as the programme was ending and the storyline was about Christmas and misery, apparently this is a stable diet for this programme with the emphasis on misery. Anyway, the final few scenes were of a woman,looking miserable walking out of her house. When she left her house it began to snow, thats right it began to snow. Now this programme is meant to be shot in London and while the rest of London was mild and cloudy its snowing on Eastenders. Not only that all the patrons of the pub come out and start throwing snowballs at each other!. This programme is produced by the BBC, a channel that gave us a detailed summary of the Stern Report on Global Warming and yet within its ranks there are muppets writing a storyline with snow falling while 2006 is expected to be the warmest on record.

Its incredible, the Aritic icecap is shrinking and could be gone by 2040, Alpine ski reports are reporting very little snow, but its snowing on Eastenders.Yesterdays episode did,nt have as much as a frost in it.

So the only solution is to film Eastenders in Aritic and in the Alps so that the icecap won't dissappear, and people can go skiing.

When these people realise that reality is all around us?