In my local Lidl supermarket recently they introduced an automated gate system at the checkouts, so now you can’t leave the store without scanning a barcode from your receipt. This is clearly designed to reduce shoplifting. And for those of us who don’t shoplift, it could add another layer of oppression to our already over-regulated lives. Except that the German retailers were smart enough that, on the accompanying voice-over, they employed the services of a young Irish woman with a rather lovely lilting voice and accent.I think the accent is from Cork (my sincere apologies to her if it’s not). And its owner doesn’t have much to work with – her lines in full are: “Thank you for shopping at Lidl. Please take your receipt to open the gate.” But she manages to make what could be an annoying command sound perfectly sweet and reasonable. And considering what an unpromising monosyllable it is, I especially love the way she says “gate”.The way she pronounces it, mellifluously and with a rising intonation, makes the word sound like a pleasant surprise. Not if you have a bottle of wine stuffed down the inside leg of your trousers, maybe. But for the rest of us, it comes across as a little bonus. You thought you were finished shopping. But no. Now, as well, you get to open a gate.And the way she tells it, it’s not an alienating, automated gate in an urban supermarket, it’s a picturesque, rural gate, perhaps leading into a meadow where cows graze, birds sing and the field slopes gently downwards to a crystalline stream.Okay, I’m over-romanticising. Still, if we must listen to automated voices everywhere in modern life, they should at least be easy on the ear, as this one is.No doubt the man on the buses who barks: “Stand Clear! Luggage doors operating!” is required to sound imperious. But listening to him say it, over and over, feels like being hit on the head repeatedly with a rubber mallet.Or consider the English woman’s voice in my apartment block lift. No harm to her: she’s trying to sound calmly efficient. It’s just that her monotone voice and accent make “door opening” and “door closing” sound like equally drab non-events. And then there’s her constant negativity, always talking about other people’s “flaws”, for no good reason: “first flaw”, “second flaw”, “third flaw”, etc.Whereas in Lidl now, even around the teatime rush when she’s doing the announcement 10 times a minute, the young Cork woman makes every gate sound special: a little path to freedom, just for you.Sometimes, as the meadow beyond beckons, you want to just climb over the gate rather than opening it. But that’s probably not advisable in Lidl.***Further to the subject of St Dunstan and his supposed influence on May weather, Terry Walsh writes from Cartagena to draw my attention to the logo of a school in London named after him (after Dunstan, that is, not Terry).The logo features a typical heraldic shield with a bishop’s hat on top and, in the upper left quadrant, an image of the 10th century saint himself. But the school, founded in 1888 on the 900th anniversary of Dunstan’s death, has cleverly left the rest of the shield blank, except for the Latin motto underneath.That reads Albam Exorna, meaning “Adorn the White”. In effect, a bit like the young Cork one in Lidl encouraging us to open the gate, it tells the school’s students to go forth and, in achieving their potential, design the rest of the logo themselves. ***An obvious omission from my “20 things I’ve learned in 20 years of writing this column” (An Irishman’s Diary, Wednesday), I realised afterwards, was the meaning of life. No, not the one philosophers have been seeking since time immemorial: I haven’t had any big breakthroughs with that. But I’m reminded of an incident that happened to me in a taxi once, years ago.I was on the way out to RTÉ to do a radio interview and, as usual, rehearsing lines in my head while also making polite conversation. Then, wrapped up in thought briefly, I lost the thread of what the taxi driver was saying, until he reeled me in again with the startling question: “What is life?”How had the conversation taken this profound turn, I wondered for a moment. Had the driver experienced a sudden, existentialist crisis? I gave him a puzzled look.“What is life these days?” he repeated, matter-of-factly. Then I realised he was listening to a radio court report about sentencing in a criminal case. With some relief, I guessed the answer he needed was, with average parole, “about 15 years”.I wouldn’t for a moment compare the privilege of writing this column to a life sentence. Even so, it’s sobering to realise that if it were one then I could have been out five years ago with good behaviour.