Will we have to roll with it?

HAVING just said that, should we be making an exception on the guilt-tripping front for the toilet roll hoarders?

I read a couple of accounts from the retail business this week suggesting that rather than panic-buying, most customers are actually buying twice their usual weekly shop, which is not quite the same and more intelligible.

The big supermarkets’ “just in time” supply chains, which reduce stock levels to a minimum, are also blamed.

Nonetheless, the fact remains – as a friend of mine who’s a security guard at a nearby store confirmed – that the shelves are stripped of toilet rolls within the first hour of business by the queues of people already there when the doors open.

Does this mean that when our own home stocks run out sooner rather than later, Mrs Kelly and I are going to have to swallow our pride and realise that if we can’t beat the dawn raiders, we’re going to have to join them?

OF course, none of this would have been a problem if we’d done what we half-joked about following our holiday in Japan last year.

I say half-joked, because we were so enamoured by that country’s toilets during our stay that we did consider investing in one on our return.

Motion sensor lids, heated seats, an integrated bidet and even musical accompaniment to camouflage certain sounds, they

were as much a symbol of the Land of the Rising Sun’s admirable high standards as the wonderful Shinkansen bullet trains.

They are a bit more expensive than your average British toilet, but had we gone with our instincts and turned Japanese, the great loo roll panic would have been rendered academic.

Might it be one of those businesses in which shares soar once the markets pick up again?

I WAS reminded last weekend of that old joke: “When a man tells you he’ll do something, he will – there’s no need to remind him every six months about it”.

It was Saturday afternoon, around usual kick-off time, but with the football season in a state of suspended animation like everything else, I found myself instead scooping stinking handfuls of accumulated rotting vegetation from the guttering on our garage.

Well, after four years, it was bound to have built up a bit...