It was sensible of the pharmacists not to withhold prescribed medication from the thousands of their customers who are taking statins. If they had opted for that unwise course of action, many pharmacists would have been assaulted with golf clubs, rolled up copies of the RTÉ Guideand the occasional gardening tool. They would have died in a blaze of V-necked sweaters.
Their last sight of this world would have been of murdering hands coming out of fleeces. The getaway cars would have been very clean and driven under the speed limit, making them easy to identify on the nation's roads.
Luckily, the pharmacists decided to withhold methadone from the State's opiate users instead - a far more malleable group of people.
No one wants to aggravate Grumpy Old Men - or even Grumpy Middle-Aged Men, now that statins are being prescribed to the under-50s. The habits of this group, situated on the margins of society, are well known. Golf. Couple of scoops. Nap. Dinner. Intractable antipathy towards Patricia McKenna. And a religious devotion to Sky Sports. Don't cross them, is my advice.
Which brings us to the Rugby World Cup, an orgy of masculinity both real and imagined. I mean, of course, that the masculinity is both real and imagined. It took a peculiar kind of genius to imagine the Rugby World Cup for men, and luckily that task does not have to be repeated.
It is a strange sort of game that leaves its mountainous players on all fours, sobbing like small children (Chabal, France). It is a strange sort of game that has a father, weeping, carrying his dignified toddler daughter round the stadium (Pichot, Argentina). One cannot help picturing these two men at their respective mothers' gravesides, stoically biting their lips and being strong.
There is no shame, though, in sobbing your heart out when your team has been defeated. The French went down like ninepins, poor things, when the final whistle was sounded. The Argentine team, when their time came, were what mothers used to call Beyond The Beyonds (trans: overwrought, overtired and irrational).
Rugby is personal. Never can so many people have been insulted by a generalisation than your average rugby fan was by the allegation that there was a poor performance coming from the rugby teams based in the northern hemisphere.
The northern hemisphere is quite a big place, but after the England-Australia game, I saw males of my acquaintance shouting at the television: "Now! Now what do you think of the bloody northern hemisphere, you b*****ds!"
It is not that this extraordinary behaviour strikes the detached observer as a bad thing - let sport replace war, we say, and the sooner the better - merely bizarre. Sport is the theatre of heterosexual male emotion and, judging by what has been happening at the Rugby World Cup, there is an awful lot of heterosexual male emotion hanging about on street corners, waiting to be asked out.
On Monday, the Times of Londondescribed Jonny Wilkinson as "the Job of sport". Mind you, the Times of Londonhas Jonny Wilkinson under an exclusive contract, but still.
The poetic sensibility is not confined to sports journalists either. On Saturday there was a lot of tut-tutting and disapproval about the English team, allegedly for playing the Wrong Sort of Rugby. The English team won, but their victory was said to be Bad For The Game.
There seems to be quite a few younger men who are using this World Cup as some sort of test case. First of all, there was the performance of the Irish team. Now, if the Wrong Sort of Rugby triumphs, these supporters might desert the game altogether, as they have previously deserted Irish soccer. Things are on a bit of a knife edge. Or so we are told.
As in any soap opera, the opportunities for a fan to engage with a rugby game are endless. When your team is eliminated, you don't stop watching, you just shift your allegiance to another team; isn't that, after all, what Argentina is for? When you think a team has played poorly, then you have to watch all their next games just to make sure your analysis was correct. Even when you become convinced that the entire game of rugby is going down the tubes, you have to keep watching.
If one tries to think of a similarly cross-generational pursuit for a female audience, you can just about come up with fashion, over which far fewer tears are shed. Women either like a fashion or they don't; they either buy a style or they don't.
They don't sit around talking about whether it is the Wrong Sort of Fashion and become insulted or depressed about the future of humanity simply because the fashion business has taken a new turn. Fashion, strangely, is a much more clinical enterprise than sport. Despite the propaganda, those footballers' wives are not really the emotional ones in the family.
The rugby fan is a volatile and unpredictable creature - although he still likes dinner put in front of him at seven sharp. Who knows what he will do next week when his drug is taken away?