I have recently got digital satelite television. As I live in England, that has made the number of channels I can access go up from just four to about two-hundred.

As a result, I have got into the terrible habit of channel hopping. If I'm on MTV, and a song come up that I don't like too much, I jsut flick through the other ten or so channels until I find a song I do like.

While this is better than my old predicament (especially on Saturdays, when three out of the four channels had sport and the other had an ancient melodramatic film), it does leave me to believe that maybe we have a bit too much choice. Regularly I have a conflict when there are ten different programmes I want to watch, which leaves me in a right pickle.

This extends throughout. In my local supermarket you can get over ten varieties of plum tomatoes in tins - whole, chopped, peeled, in sauce, without sauce, extra value pack, small pack, puréed... If I ever need chopped plum tomatoes, I just get whole ones and chop them up. Other people buy them ready chopped - for a much higher price. Indeed, with some products you pay twice as much for chopped as for whole!

The situation has got worse with the problems about Genetically Modified foods. There is now an "organic" variety of everything you could possibly want - from cheese to toilet roll (how they figure that one out I don't know) - as well as versions for vegetarians and diabetics (which I can fully understand, mind you).

Even worse is the range of flavours and colours you can get. A whole aisle for jams and preserves? A whole aisle for tea and coffee? Please!

This is really confusing. Indeed, Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) described this process as a "confusopoly" - the opposite of a monopoly.

Unfortunately, I'm running a losing battle. I don't see why hundreds of thousands of people pay twice the price just to have something cut in two - but they do.

Chrico "Still, I'm happy about the TV..." Rinotir