How on earth the building pictured below got planning permission is a mystery well beyond me. It opened in 2006 and contains the printing presses which run off the majority of the newspapers owned by Thomas Crosbie Holdings (TCH). This includes the Irish Examiner, and the Evening Echo. In the opening ceremony, Michael Martin, the Enterprise Minister, pressed the button to start the presses.

 The building clearly doesn't compliment the landscape in any way. Instead it interrupts it, it shuts it up mid sentence, and is just simply plain ugly in its surroundings. Any one care to guess how it might have been approved?

The Rochestown Park Hotel is a four star hotel. On Saturday evening as I  was in Cork for the weekend I stopped by there with my bother and sister for a drink. My brother ordered a Murphys, my sister an OJ and for myself, a still water. My sister was buying. She handed me a glass full of ice, the barman assuming I was having ice rather than asking.

   "Could I get a glass without ice?"

A four star service? The barman took the glass back, threw the ice out of it and handed the same glass back, rather than getting a clean one. Mental note: don't come back here in a hurry, clearly either the staff aren't being trained or they just hire dipsticks.

Householders were reminded during the week of their prodigal attitude to wasting food. The blame for dumping 3.3million tonnes of edible food into landfill sites is tipped squarely onto us as the consumers. In landfill the food breaks down and causes "greenhouse gases" which, we're reminded, contribute to the type of weather which has left large swathes of the UK under water.

Earlier in the year, Jennie Price, a former Chief Executive of Wrap, the UK's waste body, advised us to look in the fridge or cupboard before shopping, and as far back as 2005 Lord Haskins accused us of having "eyes...bigger than stomachs".

Meanwhile the supermarkets are in the clear. You can still buy food off the shelf which is already rotting. You can still buy food where the use by date is the day you're actually buying it (and you're still paying full price). 

Every adult in the UK, according to Wrap, wastes approximately £400 a year on food that ends up in the bin. Where else is it supposed to go if you can't eat it?

Enticed in by the Sales signs and in need of some new shirts I went into Austin Reed in Kingston's Bentall Centre. Although my main reason for going out had been to buy a new pair of boots in Jones ("the bootmakers") they only had shoes, and I couldn't go home empty handed.

 Formal shirts were on a two for three in Austin Reed and there were also shirts marked down by half price. I found one shirt in the half price bay and then picked out another three formal shirts. The three formal shirt were £50 each and the half price came in at a few pence short of £25.

He hesitates, then quietly cancels the transaction, and runs the items through again as two separate sales. "That's accountants for you", he explains, while handing me the single bag. As I leave I feel, erroneously, as if I'm up £25 - Wuwho! Next stop Threshers. 

Prime Minster Gordon Brown pictured at the weekend on the circular line returning from Tiger Tiger.

Gordon Brown promises to lead a government of "all the talents".

Homebase's online store seems to have disappeared from the internet. Today when I tried to visit all I got was a blank page and an egg timer. I wonder if this is an improvement over the prior week where the site simply said "Sorry, homebase... is temporarily unavailable". Given DIY sales are in decline wouldn't you think they'd have made a better effort?

The Mountfield HP470 hand propelled petrol mower with its Briggs & Stratton engine is a dud. Since writing about its slow start last year things have only got worse. The wheels continue to fall off and the push bars have now buckled. At first I thought it might be trying to transform, chitty chitty bang bang style, into some kind of super, hovering mower. But no, the mower, which is under two years old and has been used less than twenty times, looks as if its been in service since the last century. I don't think it will make another cut and looks destined for the scrap heap.