Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland.
There is a man in the town who'll clean your gutters for a tenner. You know this because a sliver of rainforest has been razed so that he can advertise this fact to you and your neighbours. A forest tribe woke up this week to find their hunting grounds levelled, so that you could be informed that Bubbles creche is now taking bookings.
Junk mail is one of the great nuisances of our age. All day long the letterbox clatters to the sound of unwanted information gate-crashing your sanity; leaflets that are good only for the exercise they give you as you trudge repeatedly from door to bin. Yet, it is somehow still illegal to fit a mouse-trap to your letterbox.
Perhaps it would be wiser to nail the green bin directly below it, because that would need collecting only twice a year if it weren't over-flowing with homeware catalogues, take-away menus and dodgy scratch cards. Every county now appears to have more free local newspapers than there are reporters. Taxi companies spend more time posting business cards than they do driving people around.
In comparison, junk e-mail is a limited inconvenience. Junk e-mail doesn't wedge in the letterbox and allow the gale to blow through your house. It doesn't pile up on the doormat as a handy signal to passing burglars that you're not home.
There is a facility through which you can have your name and address removed from marketing company lists, although it would be like scooping a snowball from an avalanche. Most of the junk comes in the form of leaflet drops, sometimes co-ordinated by companies who make a livelihood from this noble task, but often delivered by kids earning extra pocket money. So you could collar the perpetrator as he once again tramples across your carefully landscaped garden, but chasing after a 10-year-old and yelling at him about privacy and littering and data protection acts will give you only fleeting satisfaction. Especially when the kid has spent all morning contemplating dumping his bag of leaflets in a hedge and spending his earnings in the amusement arcade.
You could always call to each of the businesses in turn and shove your unwanted paper waste through their letterbox, but the law tends to be a bit sniffy about such matters. Or you could follow up on those estate agents' leaflets asking if you want to sell your house, requesting in return that they find you a house on an island that is inaccessible for half the year. Otherwise, there is little escape from junk mail. And at least you know that there's a bloke down the road who rents out bouncy castles at amazing prices.