There are certain things I swore I wouldn't write about when this column started. Taxis, the lack of them and the drivers thereof was one such subject, for the simple reason that everybody complains about them so incessantly that the rant would be like the catechism, formed of unarguable truths and untenable responses and known to all.
Waiters and their ability to do anything so long as it's exactly what you don't want them to do was another taboo, as were shop assistants. This was partly because ranting about them is as boring as ranting about taxi drivers, and partly because I have been both a waitress and a shop assistant in my time and feel a certain sense of solidarity that is curiously lacking when it comes to bus drivers and the catering division of Ryanair (you have been warned).
However, a recent incident is just too indicative of certain trends in Ireland to leave unremarked. A friend was over from London for a few days and decided to spend a day shopping for a birthday present for his girlfriend. Now this man is something terribly big in the City to do with management consultancy or equilibrium control or the like, and has recently been promoted to his boss's job and given the run of the Bank of England from the sounds of it. He is still only 26 and, more to the point, was on his holidays so was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and trainers when he decided to make the trek round a few of the city's more salubrious jewellery and design shops. By the time I met him at 5 o'clock he was just a little exasperated.
Taking my advice he had headed down to a trendy and terribly expensive designer jewellery emporium where he had pored over several glass cases featuring little enamel and horsehair nothings, and hummed and hawed at length. While he was doing this, two woman stood at a counter and discussed Liberian politics, made a few vital phone calls to sort out the situation in the North and talked a lone nutter out of a hostage situation. Well, he presumed that's what they were doing because, despite widespread rumours that they were responsible for selling the jewellery in the cases, they obviously had no intention of doing anything of the sort. In the end he left, unremarked, unmourned, in high dudgeon and went to spend a filthy amount of money elsewhere in the city.
We both agreed that the other extreme - being shadowed by a shop assistant as persistent as only a toddler knows how - was equally as irritating. I was recently hijacked in the changing room of a very posh shop by a shop assistant shrieking at her colleagues to come and LOOK at what a good fit these trousers were on me.
The only problem was that the trousers in question were wedged somewhere around my thighs from whence they would go neither up nor down. I could quite cheerfully have throttled her. But the women in this jewellery shop had presumably not bothered with this kind of hard sell because they presumed that my fairly shabby-looking friend wouldn't have the money to buy anything. If we were to give them the benefit of the doubt we would say that they didn't want to hassle him, but he says he was in there so long with such a furrowed brow that he would have thought it only polite to ask whether he wanted to look at something or was just constipated.
The fact is, Ireland hasn't really caught up with her own new rich. Everybody in the service industry seems to think that, if somebody is going to spend wads of cash, they must be wearing a suit, or something terribly smart with a matching handbag and shoes. This is simply not the case anymore - a lot of the big money is being made in industries where people don't have to look smart and don't have to be over the age of 30 to be seriously wealthy.
But still the snobbery reigns supreme. I've grown very accustomed to being completely invisible when I wander the shops on a Saturday, wearing a pair of combats or a vintage dress or jeans. Of course, most of the time the ladies who ignore my presence are perfectly correct in supposing that I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than lay out £4,000 for a dress, but even I have my moments of extravagance.
Over lunch last Sunday, I compared notes with other shopaholic friends and found that we all have similar tales to report. We were positively frothing with indignation until one girl described an interesting conundrum from the other side of the counter.
She works as a waitress in a busy city centre restaurant and the other week a couple came in whom, in all fairness, she could only describe as "dodgy". Undeterred she gave them her best smile and a menu and went on with the other million things that needed doing. The pair departed shortly afterwards taking somebody's handbag with them and my friend was roundly berated for not keeping a closer eye on them - after all, couldn't she see from the look of them that they were up to no good.
This struck her as remarkably unfair on both her and the bag-nicking couple, and struck us all as an interesting example of how the service industry needs to pull up its socks. Because the whole idea behind good service, whether it's in restaurants or shops or wherever, is that anybody, be they a shop-lifter or a millionaire, is a possible customer and should be treated equally.
But it's just not like that in Ireland, a land of terrible snobs who think that people who ostentatiously light their cigars with fivers are big spenders and people with shabby clothes are out to nick something. Nine out of 10 times that might be correct, but it's neither fair, polite nor particularly good sense economically to operate like this much longer.
The people who ignore me on my Saturday non-shopping sprees might be right most of the time but woe betide them on the day I feel in need of a pair of Prada shoes . . .