`The Irish humour' - consumed by the tiger?

A reader from New Zealand e-mailed this the week with kind words and a plea. Exiled from Ireland, she keeps in touch with a subscription to Saturday's newspaper, but admits she misses "the Irish humour" and worries her daughters will never understand it. "Could you write some pieces about the traffic, the prices in the supermarket, television programmes?" she asks.

Well, Lucy, the truth is many of us here miss the Irish humour too. I don't know when you left, but our economic success appears to have had a deflationary effect on the whole humour sector. As a glance at the IT letters page will confirm, many of us are permanently depressed about everything from the traffic to the prices in the supermarket. Don't get us started on the television programmes!

I'm sure New Zealand has its own sense of humour. I know so, because I once wrote a preview of the rugby world cup for a satirical magazine here, a piece which represented what I hoped was a fair, unbiased attempt to insult all the participating countries equally. And of the leading rugby powers, New Zealand alone featured the article on the front page of one of its Sunday newspapers! That sense of fun wasn't named in the All Blacks team to face Ireland subsequently, but still . . .

Anyway, Lucy, as regards supermarket prices, I'm afraid I know little, except that we have twice as many as when you lived here, because values are now shown in euros too. Although it is me who does the weekly shopping for the house, I'm one of those people (i.e. men) who never notice the prices. I know you can get 10 apples of any variety for £1.98 (about 2.54 euros), only because this saves having to weigh them, and that a decent bottle of New Zealand wine seems to start at a shocking £8.72 (11.07 euros). But that's it.

I usually hand the supermarket receipts to my wife, who has a complex accounting system for keeping household expenditure within the budgetary guidelines from Brussels. What happens is she does an initial scan of the total and says "Oh my God!". Then she puts the receipt away carefully in a drawer with all the others, and this system ensures that eventually, by the time we move house again, we'll have enough receipts to fill a box.

The reasons men don't easily memorise supermarket prices are no doubt primal. For millions of years, it was our role to go out and just kill the next meal - an option still not offered by most supermarkets which, frankly, cater more for female needs. And I don't know what other men do, but I try to compensate for the missing "buzz" by bringing home something new, exotic, and if possible, useless each week.

Recently I bought a coconut, although I have no idea how you open a coconut or what happens when you do. For a while, my wife used it in a flower arrangement until, somehow, it found its way upstairs. Whereupon my son, aged one (1.27 euros), worked out that by dropping it over the safety gate, it would roll very noisily down the wooden stairs, causing momentary heart-failure in his parents.

This is now a ritual and the coconut, clearly, has been a success. But I also have a weakness for buying evil-looking cheeses that go equally uneaten, and have no children's entertainment applications - none you could live with, anyway. A more modest extravagance recently was organic eggs (at, I remember this, a highly organic 31 pence each) to see if they were superior to mere free-range eggs. I couldn't honestly say they were, but we haven't tried rolling them down the stairs yet.

The subject of traffic in Dublin is almost too painful to discuss, Lucy, despite the fact that parking costs and fines are punitive and the only regulatory device not yet attempted by the Corporation is the forced amputation of limbs (to be introduced on a pilot basis in April).

Even at the supermarket, it's a problem. On Saturdays, it can be harder to find a parking space than a shopping trolley that moves in a straight line. You drive around and around the car-park and hope you get lucky - there was a time last season I was averaging more laps than the Jordan grand prix team. Until, finally, I resorted to using the space reserved for shoppers with children.

Before anybody writes angry letters, I should point out that I do bring the children to the supermarket. But this is another guy thing - you still feel guilty using a space so wide that you could park a bus, badly, in. I know that, as a matter of male pride, I should seek a space sufficiently tight that the only way to get the kids out of the car would be through the sunroof. And if I had a sunroof, I would.

I'll come back to TV programmes another time, Lucy. But I note you also say it may be time to "hit the Celtic tiger full on". My advice, if you are planning a visit, is to pack the New Zealand sense of humour in your suitcase. Oh, and maybe you'd better bring a few bottles of the wine too.

Frank McNally can be contacted at fmcnally@irish-times.ie