You must never trust a man who hunts south of the Thames, who has soup for lunch, or who waxes his moustache

Good to see that following yesterday’s slip by Des Browne, firmly not saying sorry is now very much back on the political agenda. To quote our soon to be absolute ruler yesterday “I tell the House that I do not apologise.” That’s more like it.

Seething today due to an evening wasted weeping in frustration at my inability to cope with technology. In 30 short minutes, the following things ganged up on me:

• wireless keyboard on PC packed up


• no i-Link port (whatever that is) on my PC, rendering expensive stolen camcorder useless. Karma, man.


• discovered that memory card in camcorder doesn't work because it has too much memory (double Karma, man), then


• forgot internet bank password, then


• forgot password for memory stick that contains spreadsheet with all my passwords, then


• forgot password protecting the spreadsheet containing all my passwords, so


• locked out on internet bank, then


• replacement password sent to my BlackBerry didn't arrive, because Tooting doesn't appear to have a 3G network yet, then


• poured a large G&T and tried to calm down

On the day after inflation busted 3%, and the humble British £ hit $2, a quick bitch. An Abercrombie & Bitch, in fact.

Before I gave up pretending that I was a young buck, I bought the odd item of yuppie (or more correctly, preppy) kit from A&F’s US website (they weren’t interested in the UK at the time). A t-shirt probably cost around $40, or maybe £25.

Now these goddam yanks are under-dressed and over here, having opened a store some place in the West End where the upper echelons (the sort one sees getting pissed at the Mariners in Rock after a hard day’s jet skiing whilst waiting for their GCSE results) drag their reluctant parents to spend a couple of hundred quid on some pre-wrinkled shirts.

The thing is, A&F have used Gap’s tactic of pricing their UK clothes by simply applying Tip-pex to the price label, changing our $40 US t-shirt into a £40 London t-shirt. Great news for A&F – assuming it cost $4 at the Vietnamese factory gate, the gross profit per shirt shoots up from an already-handsome $36 to a frankly drop-dead-gorgeous $76. Ker-ching.

Being too clever by half, I wondered whether this presented an arbitrage opportunity – why not buy the kit from the US website as before, and sell on at somewhere between the $40 cost in the US and $80 UK selling price?

However, by using internet trickery worthy of the Chinese government, the fiendish yanquis have in fact blocked access to the US website from the UK – no matter how you try it, the only way to access A&F online is on the UK website, which sells half the number of items for twice the price of its US cousin. Try it. Globalisation schmobalisation - this is protectionism, pur et dur.

However, the fact that:

1. the moaning bloody Indie seems to have added A&F hating to its already long list of bloody campaigns (running stories on 18 March, 22 March, 23 March (x2) and 25 March), and,


2. A&F winds up the swivel-eyed right-wing Christian lunatic fringe Stateside,

leads me to wish these price-gouging greedy seppos all the very best. Caveat preppy emptor.