How much do you tend to spend on yoga mats?
What about virtual reality headsets, mangoes or pool sliders?
If you’re anything like me, your answer in all four cases will be ‘not a penny’.
Indeed, younger readers will mock, but I didn’t even know what pool sliders were until I looked them up on Google. (For the benefit of my fellow out-of-touch oldies, they turn out to be plastic flip-flops, designed to be worn by the swimming pool. And there was I, thinking they might have something to do with the snooker-like pub game.)
But whether we buy these things or not, the nation’s changing shopping habits mean that this week they were among the 23 new items added to the basket of goods and services used by the Office for National Statistics to calculate the official inflation rate.
So it is that they join around 750 other items – ranging from condoms to kebabs, kerosene and coffee pods – whose price fluctuations determine the Consumer Price Index, on which so many government and business decisions are based.
As it happens, Mrs U and I never buy any of the things I’ve mentioned above, any more than we feel the need for yoga mats.
Nor do we spend anything these days on marriage licences, child-minders or frozen chicken nuggets, all of which appear in the ONS basket.
But then we can hardly blame the country’s official statisticians for coming up with inflation figures that don’t reflect our personal spending habits.
The fact is that we all have individual inflation rates, unique to ourselves, depending on how we choose to spend our money.
Inevitably, these can differ wildly from the national average, just as they do from person to person.
Struggles
In my own case, for example, every week I buy an inordinate quantity of cigarettes, wine from the supermarket and rounds of drinks at the pub – all of which have shot up, year after year, by percentages far greater than the official inflation rate.
Indeed, I’m old enough to remember a time when I promised myself I’d give up smoking if ever the price of a packet of Marlboro Reds rose to as much as a blistering £1 a packet.
Today, they cost well over £16 for 20 at my local newsagent – and even more elsewhere in the capital. But I’m a pathetic slave to nicotine and I’m puffing away more than ever.
As for the price of the cheapest pint of bitter at the pub up the road from the office, it seems only the other day when it cost me less than £3.
At lunchtime yesterday, I had to shell out £6.05 – pretty average by central London standards – and the price seems to keep rising every week.
Now it can only go up further, as the hospitality industry struggles to cope with the increases in employers’ National Insurance contributions and the minimum wage, imposed by Rachel Reeves in her growth-crushing first Budget last year.
I hasten to say that I’m no statistician, but once we’ve added the spiralling cost of council tax, green levies on energy bills, postage stamps, car parking, congestion charges and Reeves’s various stealth taxes, I suspect my own personal inflation rate comes to at least three times the CPI, which is hovering at around 3 per cent.
Devours
All I can say for sure is that I feel a great deal more than 10 per cent poorer with every passing year.
And that’s in spite of those rises in my state pension guaranteed (but for how long?) by the Tories’ failed electoral bribe of the triple lock.
Mind you, I have a great deal less cause for complaint than others whose personal inflation rates are soaring into the stratosphere.
I’m thinking of the many who have to pay rent for their homes, my four sons among them.
Every year, the cost of keeping a roof over their heads devours a huge proportion of their income, which increases much faster than either of the main indices.
Then there are those who send their children to private schools, who are being hit by the 20 per cent VAT on fees imposed by this class-warrior Government in its war against families it imagines to be toffs.
Even three decades ago, when we sent our first and second sons to private schools, the fees rose yearly at a terrifying rate – so much so that we had to abandon our plans to send sons numbers three and four to join them.
There was no way we could have afforded to educate even the older two privately if Margaret Thatcher, John Major or Tony Blair had suddenly decided to slap an extra 20 per cent on the fees.
As countless parents now face having to remove their sons and daughters from schools where they are happy and
well-taught, it’s no wonder that so many of these envied institutions are struggling to survive.
Some private schools have already said they will have to shut up shop.
Indeed, I note that the latest casualties include the 137-year-old St Anselm’s prep school near Bakewell, Derbyshire, which was once named by Tatler magazine as the best in Britain.
If rising costs and prices force even a school of this calibre to close, I wonder how long it will be before a great many others follow suit, releasing a flood of extra pupils into an already over-stretched public sector.
Quite how this is supposed to boost the nation’s finances, let alone its standards of education, is anybody’s guess.
Announcing St Anselm’s imminent closure this summer, the chairman of its governors made the reasons for it crystal clear. Pupil numbers had declined, Paul Houghton told parents, and the school was operating at a financial loss.
‘Added to this, the substantial recent government taxation pressures on all independent schools – the addition of VAT on school fees, having to pay increased National Insurance contributions and the removal of business
rates relief for independent schools – it is now unsustainable to keep the school open.’
Of course, many will point out that while the personal inflation rates suffered by many like me are much higher than the CPI, those experienced by others are lower.
Remedy
No doubt they will also tell me that if I want to bring my personal rate down, the simple remedy is in my own hands. All I need do is give up smoking and drinking, turn the heating down and get rid of the car.
Before I know it, they will say, my personal inflation rate will tumble well into the minus territory.
To them, I will only say this is easier said than done. I’m far too old, now, to abandon my traditional vices and learn new ways, in this strange age of yoga mats, pool sliders and virtual reality headsets, the latter of which Britons apparently spent £350million on last year.
Or perhaps those headsets are the answer to all our woes.
With Putin in the Kremlin, Trump in the White House and Keir Starmer installed in No 10, after all, I guess a virtual world can only be an improvement on the real thing.