poundland

As a wily old retail bird, few will be more accustomed than your Pat to the PR fripperies of my competitors. Even so, I was astonished at the magnanimous offer from Poundland to continue to accept pounds, and indeed at the similar warm-hearted undertakings from our otherwise Teutonic cousins.

Pat’s Mart is, as ever, never knowingly underspun, and so it is that through the pages of the nation’s finest and indeed only grocery-focused periodical I pledge I will always be more than happy to accept my customers’ money. You can’t say fairer than that.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean customers should expect anything in return. But currently I have a bit of an arrangement with my grey-market tobacco supplier Achillios Holdings (Calais) Ltd, whereby he slips me a list of all the pubs in central London whose fag machines still accept the old chocolate money. This means I will for a limited time only be able to offer customers a shiny new legal 20p piece for every pound coin, on condition that it is spent on full-margin baccy from my attractive mod which is kept, let us say, under the counter.

I should confess I got the idea for this brilliant offer from Mr Davis, who has proposed a similar arrangement to M Barnier of the EU. In return for getting everything we want, Mr Davis has rather generously offered to pay nearly a third of what we promised the EU for things we will still get.

Gallic to a fault, M Barnier has proved rather sniffy and so Mrs May is off on a charm offensive to Brussels. Given the PM’s resources in that department I’m afraid it looks rather as if Pat’s offer will remain the more compelling for the foreseeable future.