Inflation: it applies to so many things in modern day life!

Everybody is talking about inflation at the moment. Prices are going up and up and up.

Walking to the station at Wandsworth Town the other day and seeing all these cranes involved in building high rise appartments made me think and reflect on so many other areas of life where 'inflation' has occurred. I was on my way to look at a flat that my sons are thinking of buying and we had a meeting with the mortgage broker. Interest rates are much higher than they were a year or so ago. It made me nostalgic about the fact that I bought my first house in 1977 for ￡4500 in central Cambridge. A totally unmodernised 2-up, 2-down with a front door onto the pavement and no indoor toilet or bathroom. The interest rate went up to 15% but 15% of not a lot was not such a lot. I have advised the boys to take as long a fixed rate as they can get.

I was also nostalgic this week about inflation in things beyond just monetary matters as I went to visit a very elderly lady on whom I had operated the day before. She was sat at the wash basin in a bathing chair with the Sister washing her bare back. Margaret turned to me and to the Sister and said,

"Oh what lovely soap.....it smells wonderful!"

She was visibly completely delighted by this simple luxury; a luxury to her. It reminded me of my own mother being thrilled with a box of lemon-shaped soaps which she received, and often gave, as Christmas presents. Talcum powder or hand-cream would have been similarly treasured. Quite what someone under 60 would make of such a gift these days I can't imagine.

That same day I opened the consulting room door in my antenatal clinic to find a woman I had never met before, sitting reading a book. I asked her what the book was, as she quickly, politely, put it back into her basket. In truth it wasn't the book itself that particularly caught my eye but rather that it was obviously covered in a firm plastic outer jacket. This told me instantly that she must have got this from a library and indeed, when I asked, she said,

"Yes, I must be one of your few patients who goes to the library."

I immediately thought of when I was young and my mother would give me two threepenny-bits for my bus fare to and from the library, and I would have to decide whether to walk or take the bus in each direction; saving the fare for sweets if I walked. The actual process of being 'in the library' and coming out with my three books, was a special, quiet pleasure. I did take my children to the local library, but I don't suppose this simple, uninflated activity, features highly in children's or adult's lives much these days.

So....inflation.....I think of weddings and parties. Weddings not being a single gloriously happy event which people come to and leave as the bride and groom head off on their honeymoon, but which goes on for days or is held in faraway places at great expense. Parties with the 'pre-lash' and the 'after-party'.

I can't honestly see things going back.....'deflating'.....but perhaps there were some lessons from the pandemic which could be useful. Going for a walk and those smaller, more intimate weddings. Reflection on the way we live our lives has got to be a good thing........