I feel as though my beer mat has been pulled out from beneath me.  All of the tenets of my life have been undermined, replaced by an entirely new set of beliefs for which I have no affiliation or predilection.  The consequence: I am left adrift in an unfamiliar sea with no safe harbour in sight and none of the usual flotsam of my life to cling on to.

The reason?  The annual updating of the Office of National Statistics (ONS) Consumer Price Index shopping basket.  Obvs.

The ONS shopping basket is a list of 700 goods and services that are considered to represent the typical kind of expenses that an average British household face, and it is used to measure such variable factors as the rate of inflation.

Most years, this portentous event passes by without causing the slightest ripple across my life’s pond.  However, this year, monumental changes are afoot.  This year, pork pies are out.  It’s official.  Pork pies, I ask you.  Surely, they are a British food staple?  And what is in, in its place?  Quiche.  Quiche!  And there’s more.  Out also goes lager.  Lager!  Replaced by what?  Raspberries.  Raspberries!

Pork pies and lager.  It is as though the cornerstones of my very existence are being replaced by mere sand and rubble.

What more can the ONS do to undermine the fundamental foundations of my existence?  Before I know it, it will be elasticated waists out, and women’s leggings in.

“What’s that?  Leggings are in.”

Leggings are in.  It is the end of civilisation as I know it.  That bunker I constructed cannot be ready a moment too soon.

© Beery Sue

Beer Sue suffers from that well-known medical condition called ‘the beer talking’.