Ginger Bond would struggle to look suave in a £5k whistle from Savile Row, let alone a £35 plastic tux from George. But you've got to admire his daring. Timing his intimate tête-à-tête with half the retail hacks in London to clash with King Justin's 'charm' offensive to the other half. That takes balls. Another example of Bond's brass: those eco-credentials. Not only does he pledge zero waste to landfill by 2010 (it'll still be lying around their unemptied recycling bins if my local store is anything to go by), now he even recycles old price cuts into a new press release and resuscitates pre-owned soundbites like "Christmas will be cracking at Asda" and "Let's stop the Christmas humbug". Even speaking impartially as DRIP supremo you wish they would try a bit harder. As it was, King was left to gloat over JS's magnificent profit upturn (something to do with not having any massive write-offs) and the dozy Tesco spin doctors didn't even deign to react. Perhaps they were hatching a plan to build a Tesco Express inside No 10 so Gordon Brown could go shopping without using plastic bags. Price has been quite the story of the week - and I don't mean Waitrose's own Markup de Price, who has kept a low profile. No, the entirely sober scribes of Wapping have been ranting over the price of beer, which they now regard as scandalously low. This must, of course, be an entirely different gaggle of hacks to those whining about higher grocery prices . I think I'll have to launch an in-depth probe. Talking of which, I did make some progress down at Revenue and Customs, where there's a little Grade 1 popsie who has taken a fancy to me. In fact, we've got to the stage of flirtatiously burning our favourite tracks for each other on CDs. Funny thing was, the latest disks she posted me didn't have any music on them at all, just a load of names and addresses.