Blimey!

I remember when I was a child how amazed I was by my father's stories of the cost of things in his younger life - a penny ha'penny for fish and chips, £400 for a house and so on (I was his 7th child, Dad was born in 1907) and in the 1980s I remember calculating, using Fruit Salad chews as a measure, that things cost roughly 20 times as much than they were in the mid 1960s. They say that the Mars Bar is used by some economists as a similar way of measuring the increase in the cost of living. Today, a lot things are relatively proportionally cheaper-  I recall, for instance, that my mother bought me Lord of the Rings in paperback when I was 11 for 30 shillings (£1.50 in decimal), and you can get that on Amazon for £12.47.  Colour TVs were massively expensive when they first appeared.

However, we went to the Odeon last night to see Robert Zemeckis' new 3D version of A Christmas Carol, which was great fun, but at  a whopping £11.30 a ticket (3D specs thrown in), that is ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN AND A HALF times as expensive as a ticket (two bob) for the Regal, Cranbrook, in the late 1960s. Yep, forty years ago, okeydokey, but blimey charley - I must be getting old!