The £2 Basil Leaf

Some thoughts on the edge of the Great Tariff Hooha

We moved country a month ago from Co. Wicklow, Ireland to Upper Bavaria, Germany. My primary task has been to pack my library in Ireland and unpack it here in Germany. Actually that is not quite true: my primary - i.e. most important - task has been to ensure that I have all the paperwork required for a successful long term visa application processed in time so they don’t hoof me out of the country once I pass the post-Brexit allotted 90 days for Brits to stay in any European country, with the exception of Ireland and Cyprus. Here is the map to back that up ( I am working on the assumption that it is just a coincidence that the UK is coloured the same as Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but you never know). We holders of Her (now His) Britannic Majesty’s passport can only stay indefinitely longer in the countries coloured black - make of that what you will: It still feels like an unnecessarily vindictive response to our quite reasonable secession request. Don’t get me started.

That primary primary task now having been completed - “it’s in the post, sir. Should be with you any day” (translated from the original Bavarian) - the secondary primary task is now to unpack and reorder my books. This is taking much longer than expected because I keep distracting myself from the unpacking-sorting job at hand by coming across some tome or other, long lost from memory and browsing it or perhaps even sitting down on one of the many unpacked boxes in the old hay barn to study it more intensely. A bit like this only not as smart.

One great surprise was the number of boxes that had remained in storage in Ireland for a decade and to which I never managed to get around to attending. These included the large volume collections of the Encyclopedia Britannica as well as the German equivalent Brockhaus, as well as, to my delight, books that I had forgotten ever having owned at all. One such bears the irresistible title “Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? - The Encyclopedia of Modern Life” published 20 years ago in 2005 by a brace of writers named Steve Lowe and Alan MCarthur who may well have gone on to win Pullitzer prizes for subsequent works but I somehow doubt it. It must have been popular because (astonishingly) it was republished 5 times in the same year. I suspect in damp downstairs loos across the United Kingdom in houses great and small copies of this little book are mouldering away for the amusement of guests bored of staring at school, University and regimental photographs credentialing their host’s long passed youth. They must be somewhere.

Section C (it is an alphabetical collection) starts with the entry

“Cafés that charge excessive amounts for a mug of shit tea”

A pound? A fucking pound? I know what tea costs! I make it all the time!

and follows with

“Cafés that charge excessive amounts for a set breakfast but try to justify it by putting a bit of basil on the tomato” under which headline we are told

I know how much basil costs, too!And it’s not the £2 you’ve just slapped on the price of my breakfast. It’s much less than that — slightly over £1.99 less. Why don’t you just have done with it and move your family into my fucking house?

The whole book goes on more or less in that tone and style so this is definitely not a recommendation (although the entry a few pages later on “Charles, Prince of Wales” is worth the £9.99 entry price all by itself.) The £2 breakfast premium did prompt me to look up what a full breakfast (two eggs, sausage, black pudding, beans, tomato and toast) cost back in 2005. Answer: around £4 to £6 in London and between £3.50 and £4.50 outside. Today a similar London breakfast costs around £14 to £16, often more (outside of ludicrously overpriced hotel dining rooms). The computed rate of inflation which this range implies is from a low (£6 then to £14 today) 4.33% to a high of 7.18% with an average 5.65%. The official CPI figure for the average rate of inflation for that period is a tick over 2%.

Another way of looking at this is by asking how many breakfasts an ounce of Gold would have purchased in both periods (a technique that I first saw used to brilliant effect by Ronnie Stoefele’s Incrementum team in their annual Oktoberfest Index measuring the fluctuation of the number of Mass of Bier that 1oz of Gold would have bought over the past 75 years). In this case the average price of 1oz of Gold mid year 2005 was some $435 resulting in a breakfast to gold ratio of 87. Today (using a cable rate of $1.33 and a gold price of $3,270) that ratio is 154 implying that either Gold was seriously mispriced in 2005 (too cheap) or today (too expensive). I suspect the former, as a longer term view of the Gold price and another interesting ratio would seem to suggest.