A Mayo view on the rising cost of porter and postage stamps

by Auld Stock

THE price of a pint of porter has been increased by 12 cents and now costs €5.60.

This is near enough my weekly wage when I got married many moons ago.

You really wonder when the price of everything will stop increasing.

The poor man’s pint is increasingly becoming the rich’s man’s pint.

The first pint of porter I drank cost 1 shilling and 3 old pennies.

Four pints for 5 bob and you were away for slates.

I have always felt the porter that came out of wooden barrels had a better flavour than the porter from steel barrels, sometimes known as the iron lung.

I don’t drink as many pints nowadays as I did when I was younger; the passing years means our constitutions cannot cope as well as it did in the former years with the consumption of liquid.

An old friend of mine, the late Tom Hunt, Milebush, always claimed a pint of porter should be drank slowly to get its full value. Some older drinkers would call this ‘nursing the pint’.

Mind you, we didn’t always take Tom Hunt’s advice. We were all bits of smart alecs in our younger days.

The price of stamps has gone up 10 cents. We in the Republic are taking a right ould licking.

It’s enough to drive a man to drink!