Misery, thy name is Lettuce Rationing

According to the newspapers, Britain is in the grip of a shortage of lettuce. Actually there is no obvious shortage here in Edinburgh. I bought a lettuce in my local Sainsbury's yesterday, but perhaps we are exceptions. Everywhere else long queues are forming outside grocers, market stalls and vegetable shows, while shoppers are carrying string bags in their pockets just in case they happen to notice a lettuce in a shop window on the opposite side of the road.

The official story is that the shortage is due to bad weather. The weather here is pretty average for February in Scotland: rain, wind and freezing temperatures, just like the rest of the year. So I am led to wonder how much of the lettuce shortage is really due to the weather and how much is due to the European Onion's crazy ‘set aside’ policy, under which nice little earner farmers receive payments for not growing food.

Maybe this is what the future holds for other areas of economic activity. On the railways, for instance. The terms of the contract which Govia, aka Southern, holds with the Department of Transport pays them a fixed sum, whether they operate the trains or not. From their point of view, that’s the same as set aside, since they can stop operating trains and claim money for not operating them.

And then there's teaching. Thousands of people are being paid to run schools and teach children even though when they come out of school a third of children can't read and seven eighths can't add up.

It isn't because of the weather, or the leaves on the line, or sitting up after midnight buggering about with a mobile phone. They’re doing it on purpose.

A small wager

Ladbroke’s have quoted me odds of 50/1 that Britain will still be a member of the European Union at 09.00 on Wednesday 27 January 2117. I intend to bet £Sc20 on it.

I have absolutely no idea at all who will collect the money, or how, should I have predicted events correctly. I shall still win my bet if Britain leaves the EU, turns around and goes back in again, but what I think more likely is that Teresa May will go to Brussels and bugger about for a few months and then announce that we have left the European Union, apart from still being in it.

I shall likely give the betting slip to charity unless my children promise faithfully to live for an unusually long time. You never can tell. With this wager as an incentive, one of them may go on to develop a remarkable drug.

In the last hundred years the price of a loaf of bread has increased by a factor of seventy two, from 5d. to £1·50 (see the web site ‘Back in My Day’) so the winnings will not make anyone rich.

Loaves of bread aside, I can’t find any prediction of inflation over the next century, so I can only estimate the value of the winnings based upon inflation over the last hundred years. That data, which comes from This Is Money, tells me that in 2117, £Sc1020 will be worth £64·48 and that in turn will be worth £Sc64 9s 6d if they reinstate real money.