Good morning and welcome to Twee!, Ireland's newest glossy and most socially discerning magazine! Copies will be distributed FREE to all homes worth £300,000 or more.
Homes worth between £200,000 to £300,000 will be charged £2 per Twee! We will tolerate readers of Twee! from houses worth over £100,000 provided they pay £5 a copy for the privilege of visiting, via our many pages of full-colour photographs, the homes of Ireland's new elite. Newsagents in working-class areas will not be permitted to stock Twee! Special Irish-invented microchip prole-sensors will detect if Twee! is being read by poor people, and will promptly cause it and them to burst into flames.
High taxes
Not that we are against the poor. Some of our investors are foremost advocates of high taxes to aid such unfortunates, though of course they are not themselves PAYE payers. More importantly, we have our advertisers to consider. Imagine how they might feel if their intimate feminine hygiene products were to be the stuff of idle tittle-tattle from the riff-raff on the bus to Darndale or Kilbarrack.
In order that Twee! visits only the grandest and richest houses in this booming Celtic Tiger wonderland, our editorial policy is the reverse of our British competitors'. They pay the owners of the homes they visit and the marriages they intrude upon. We do the opposite.
You want us to do a spread on your new house, with goldtapped bidets in every room, and leopard-skin wallpaper? Fine; we charge £10,000 a room. You want the wedding of your daughter Zoe, Emma or Chloe to feature in a 14-page spread? You pay by the pictureinch of tulle and back-combed hair appearing in Twee!
BACK! GET BACK! Form an orderly queue there. And stop waving money at me. You'll all make it to Twee! - at the right price, of course. Now, madam, you and your husband have made £20 million pounds from selling mobile phone pouches. Made by slaves in China, bought by you for 3p, sold on at £12. You want Twee! to feature your new seven-acre house on top of the Burren? More than happy to oblige. We can dedicate an entire edition of Twee! for the knock-down price of only £200,000. That is satisfactory? Excellent! So let us begin.
Our tour starts in the one hundred feet by one hundred feet bathroom. Breathtaking! The array of tasteful pastels stretch as far as the eye can see, with even the toothpaste and eyebrow tweezers in matching hues. Very restful. Two carsized baths, his and hers, carved in ivory. And a perfume-sprayer fills la salle de bain with exotic fragrances - attar of roses, Chanel Number Five, eau de cologne and many others pumped from tanks in the attic, controlled by a master-switch beside the WC (which of course will not feature in any of our photographs).
Master bedroom
Let me add: You can, for an extra £100,000, have a scratch&-sniff insert in your issue of Twee! which conjures up the olfactory essence of your dream home for complete and utter strangers. You will? Splendid!
And now Twee! visits the master bedroom - and just look at that bed! The size of Offaly, it is covered in throws from Uzbekistan, Chinese spreads, kilims from Kashmir and prayer-mats from Anatolia. Wide-eyed Victorian dolls with tarantula eyelashes lie in cheerful abandon everywhere, and the west-facing wall is covered in its entirety by a quite breathtakingly wonderful imitation ormulu mirror which, you say, was given to you by your mother - an avid but discerning collector of modern curios.
Splendid! So, for a further £100,000 only we will insert tiny giveaway copies of the mirror in your edition of Twee! You'll go for that too? Excellent!
And what a wonderful kitchen! A 20-hob cooker, three electronically controlled fanovens, a roasting spit, a barbecue, a dozen eye-level grills, four microwaves, a bonfire for martyring early Christian saints, a special frog de-gutter, a badger-baster, computer-controlled egg-openers and numerous other labour-saving devices, all controlled from a central console! Might I suggest that in the accompanying Twee! text we say that, like all Twee!'s guests, you are an enthusiastic chef and a discriminating gourmet? Excellent!
Refrigerator
Now let us open your 10,000-cubic-foot refrigerator which you had DHL'd from California. What spendours! The rare but tasty sealion, of course, occupies much of the space, but look what else is there! Foie gras, haunches of venison, larks' tongues, koala steaks, smoked kangeroo foetus in virgin olive oil, lobsters the size of pit-ponies, 25 different kinds of yoghurt, 47 sorts of fruit juice, 17 varieties of vitamin-enhanced milk, countless mineral waters, and enough champagne to launch the entire US Navy - Bollinger, Grande Dame, Crystal and Dom Perignon, naturally. But you, of course, drink moderately, work out every morning, and read oriental philosophers in your spare time.
We in Twee! believe you. You are a most wonderful person, truly representative of the new Ireland, and that will be £570,000 only.
Banker's order or gold credit cards only, please. Thank you.