Butter, Beef, and Bullshit

Inflation’s Refusal to Leave, the Human Impact, Courgette Foreskins and People who Know What They're Talking About

I've started to dread a very specific notification on my phone.

Midweek, usually. If there's a buzz on my bedside table - or the patio table, as was the case this morning - I know. I just know.

It's the economy.

It's always the damned economy. Always just after 7am. Always that little red BBC Breaking icon, glowing like a guilty conscience. And even before it lights up properly and tells me to "unlock to view this message," I already know the punchline: the economy is slowly shitting itself again.

This morning's version? Inflation is back. Like a rash, or Andrew Neil. Every time you think we might be done with it, back it comes - red, itchy, and somehow angrier than before.

“Unexpectedly,” says the BBC, as if the rest of us haven’t been watching prices crawl up like a spider you thought you’d already killed.

And god alone knows I'm tired of it. Desperately so.

CPI is now up to 3.6%, food inflation at 4.5%, core inflation rising. Butter? Up¹. Beef? Up 20%. Chocolate? Being priced like it should come with a silk ribbon and a security escort.

And this isn’t abstract. It’s not just economists refreshing their dashboards or politicians fiddling with definitions. I mean, god knows I try to keep up - but I’m not an economist, but I just know that standing in Lidl with a half-full basket and realising you’re already £12 over isn’t a fiscal theory. It’s a Saturday morning. It’s doing the maths and realising that tinned veg is now your new multivitamin.

For me, it's also the creeping guilt of having choices - being able to substitute, delay, or downgrade - when I know that there’s just no flexibility left.

That guilt made me wonder: what does this actually look like for people without my cushion of choices? So I asked people on Twitter how inflation was showing up in their daily lives.

The responses were telling.

The Price of Everything, the Comfort of Nothing

The most universal experience? The weekly shop that's become a weekly shock.

Jeanette Beer summed up the absurdity perfectly: "It's cheaper to buy groceries in Monoprix in Qatar than it is Morrisons here. Used to be the other way round." Qatar. A country where everything is imported and air-conditioned. Apparently more affordable for groceries than Britain.

Steven Billingham did the maths: "I would say weekly shops have gone up by easily more than 10%." Lew Orrow and his wife have "noticed the increased cost of our weekly shop." Lesley Dawn, despite being "on a decent salary," has "used my overdraft the last three months" just to cover the weekly shop.

Tesco beef mince doing its own version of quantitative easing. Three labels, three price hikes: £6.49 → £6.79 → £6.99 - in the space of 3 months. Photos thanks to Mrs Morris Dancer.

This isn’t about fancy balsamic vinegars, a sneaky cappuccino or avocado toast. It’s about bread, milk, and keeping the lights on. And when even that becomes a stretch, people start making trade-offs.

Not grand ones. Not dramatic ones. Just quiet, constant compromises that chip away at your quality of life.

How We Adapt (And What That Costs Us)

Paul Shieber captured the resigned absurdity: "Every now and again I utter the word 'seriously' while still putting the item in my trolley." That moment of disbelief, followed by the grim acceptance that you still, in fact, need to eat.

Geraldine's experience shows the nutritional cost: "I'm already cooking with vegetables and tins of tomatoes or stock. I rarely buy meat because the price of vegetables and the tins I use costs just as much as meat." When vegetables cost as much as meat, something fundamental has broken.

Rach's response revealed the small sacrifices that add up: "My love for two glasses of white wine while cooking is reduced to one..and I'm finding a million and one ways to eat beans and courgette foreskin² buying any other veg while I have a glut." Even the evening ritual of cooking - that tiny moment of pleasure in an increasingly joyless economy - gets rationed.

And if you think inflation only affects the respectable economy, think again. As Inevitable Big Mad Mental Davy³ put it with characteristic bluntness: "Weed and skins have gone up - just saying like." Even the small comforts people turn to when everything else is falling apart aren't immune.

Joy Evans highlighted another layer of the problem: the psychological exhaustion of never knowing what anything actually costs. "With all this 'don't pay the exorbitant price on the shelves, pay the reduced price with the card which we give you in exchange for mining your data' shenanigans, who knows what the true price of anything is these days?"

And that’s just the groceries. Beyond the weekly shop, there’s the relentless pressure of everything else - the bills, the services, the so-called essentials that now feel like luxury line items.

The Bills That Never Stop

Steven Billingham's breakdown reads like a charge sheet against the economy: "Council Tax bill up 5%. Water bill up 20%. Home insurance likewise. Gas/electricity also up."

His conclusion? "3.6% will reflect very few people's increase in cost of living." The official inflation figure becomes meaningless when your actual costs are rising at double or triple that rate.

CPI: “Just an average!” / Everyone: “Just an average of what - caviar and tumble dryers?” - thanks to Michael Callaghan for summing up the national mood with pinpoint accuracy.

Dawn Bond's frustration cuts deeper: "Noticed a huge jump in grocery prices last two years. I buy fresh food but always have done, I somehow feel BREXIT hasn't helped - olive oil is now so expensive. Supermarkets must have profits since COVID as we needed food so why doesn't it come BACK to loyal customers."

Mariken's experience shows just how pervasive the squeeze has become: "We have noticed it big time. For years we have been transferring a fixed amount to our joint account for all the bills and groceries. That also covered our mortgage. Now we are mortgage-free, so we would expect to have more money left each month. BUT even cutting down we are short!!"

When people who've paid off their mortgage are still struggling to cover basic expenses, something fundamental has shifted.

The New Normal That Nobody Chose

This is what chronic inflation does.

It doesn't just make things more expensive - it quietly reshapes how we live.

Using your overdraft for the weekly shop becomes a normal practice. You switch from meat to tinned vegetables not by choice, but by necessity. Even small pleasures - a second glass of wine while cooking - become calculations rather than habits.

And I’ve noticed this creeping into conversations everywhere: friends quietly doing the maths on whether they can afford to join us for a dinner out, colleagues reconsidering that summer holiday, people standing in supermarket aisles genuinely surprised by prices that would have seemed impossible two years ago.

It's not necessarily dramatic. It's just relentless.

And while these individual stories matter, they're also symptoms of something much larger - an economic model that has forgotten what it's supposed to serve.

Ruby Lord's response highlighted exactly why these personal experiences need broader context: "Do you think it has anything to do with what Trump is doing in America perhaps? It's a global reaction to Trumps MAGA policies."

This is precisely the kind of question that shows why individual experiences, however powerful, only tell us what's happening, not why it's happening, or why the usual responses aren't working.

The Bigger Picture (from People Smarter Than Me)

To understand the mechanics behind the human cost, I reached out to two economists who are far more qualified than I am to answer the question: how did we end up here, again?

Because while it’s easy to fixate on the latest inflation percentage flashing across your phone screen, what we’re actually living through isn’t a monthly anomaly - it’s a long, grinding erosion. A slow-motion tightening of everything, everywhere, all at once.

First up:

Frances Coppola

, economist, financial writer and author of Coppola Comment. Frances has a long track record of calling things as they are - cutting through the noise with clarity, precision, and the kind of economic literacy I pretend to possess for about five seconds at a time before reaching for another spreadsheet-shaped panic snack.

Frances explains:

“…Commentary about inflation often focuses too much on monthly figures and not enough on the continual rise… Each month’s price rises come on top of last month’s price rises, which come on top of the previous month’s, and so on. Prices never return to their previous level. So the squeeze on people’s household budgets, especially poorer people, becomes ever greater.”

She even sent me a chart, which she dubbed - rather accurately - the Misery Chart:

Misery Chart – because flatlining wages and compounding price rises are the new national pastime.

Frances also flags the narrowing gap between CPI⁴ and CPIH (which includes housing costs). The ONS frames this as a sign of relief. But, as she notes:

“The closing gap between CPI and CPIH means that average housing costs have fallen slightly in recent months. The ONS presents this as some kind of welcome relief. But since the red line is rising, this is still a picture of misery.”

In other words: even if the water’s not rising quite as fast, we’re still drowning.

Julian Jessop

, economist and commentator, echoed the same concern - especially around perception versus reality:

“Many people think that the official data understate the true inflation that they experience themselves. Actually, that is not obviously true. But shoppers are typically more aware of the prices of essential items that they buy most often, notably the cost of food which has increased relatively sharply. And regardless of the current rate of inflation, which only measures the change over the past 12 months, the average level of prices is much higher than a few years ago.”

That last line is the important one: “the average level of prices is much higher than a few years ago.” In plain English: even if inflation slows, the damage is done. There’s no reset button. No rollback. Just permanent elevation - and shrinking tolerance.

Together, Frances and Julian offer a kind of sanity check. What people are feeling isn’t irrational. It’s not a vibe issue or a perception glitch. It’s the cumulative weight of a system that keeps rising while wages stall, benefits freeze, and policymakers argue over whether or not things feel “better.”

They remind us that this isn’t about a single data point. It’s about a trajectory. And right now, that trajectory is pointed squarely at the point where coping becomes collapse.

The Market Will Provide (Just Not for You)

At this point, I half expect the next ONS update to arrive via Dear John letter: "It's not you, it's your disposable income."

We're being told - again - that the pain is temporary. That the market will self-correct. That we're nearly there, and all we need is just a bit more patience, a bit more resilience, a few more frozen sausages and loyalty card discounts to tide us over.

And yet here we are. Elbow-deep in own-brand tinned lentils. Quietly calculating the social cost of turning down a dinner invitation. Picking between courgette foreskins and secondhand anxiety. Planning our weekly meals like we're running a rationing simulation and pretending it's all part of some vaguely character-building minimalist lifestyle. Marie Kondo would be proud - we're certainly learning what sparks joy when everything else is financially impossible.

Meanwhile, the headlines talk about green shoots. The Chancellor talks about breakfast clubs. And supermarket CEOs talk about "navigating volatility" while cashing eight-figure bonuses, because nothing says economic hardship like a CEO bonus that could fund a small country's infrastructure budget.

If this is recovery, I'd hate to see recession.

Because what we're living through isn't some neutral macroeconomic shift. It's a slow, grinding test of how much people can be expected to endure - quietly, politely, and without demanding too much in return.

The test subjects are real people with real names. Lesley Dawn, using her overdraft to cover groceries despite having a decent salary. Mariken, mortgage-free but still struggling to cover basic expenses. Paul Shieber, muttering "seriously" at prices while still putting items in his trolley because, fundamentally, people need to eat. Geraldine, switching from meat to vegetables and tins not by choice, but by necessity.

These aren't statistics. They're symptoms of a system that has forgotten what it's supposed to serve.

And the answer, if you read the comments, the receipts, and the empty wine glasses, is: not much more.

1. A sidenote on this - who can we arrest for the fact that Lurpak now costs anywhere between £5 and £7 a tub? Ta.

2. This is supposed to read as forsaken. I’ve left it in because it made me giggle.

3. There’s double barrel names, then there’s Inevitable Big Mad Mental Davy. Mad respect.

4. CPI is the government’s preferred inflation measure - it tracks the price of a standard basket of stuff you’re supposed to buy, like milk, bread, and trousers from M&S. CPIH is the same thing, but with housing costs included, so it’s a bit closer to what actual humans experience. Neither includes the cost of screaming into the void.