Yes the modest battered or breaded prawn dish is an indicator of inflation or should that be deflation.
As pub prices go up (presumably in an effort to recoup some of the losses brought on by the pandemic), the number of pieces of scampi seems to be going down.
Today we ate at the Tiger Inn in the delightful Sussex village of East Dean, somewhere we seem to gravitate to quite a lot. The village green is fringed by a bistro and the Tiger and on Wednesdays they have a craft market in the morning.
But back to the scampi. Food prices since lockdown was relaxed seem to have risen considerably and I base that on one meal in Norfolk and two in Sussex. It looks like the average price for a meal is now somewhere around £12 while I remember it being nearer to £10 before lockdown and that was after an increase.
I do feel sorry for food businesses because there must be a fine line between making up for lost revenue and putting people off with inflated prices.
But back to the scampi. I remember when you would get 12 pieces for around £7. Then it was 10 pieces for around £9, then eight pieces for £10 and now seven pieces for £12+ Yes that's correct a measly seven pieces for £12.20. It was advertised with chips and salad. Sadly, as seems to be so often the case, the term salad was a distinct misnomer. Salad in this case consisted of a few leaves. That is not a salad. All too often "leaves dressed up as salad" exist to cover up the paucity of other food on the rest of the plate.
So it's an economic fact that prices go up as the number of bits of scampi go down!
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East Dean is the village where Sherlock Holmes retired to look after his bees. I know this because there is a blue plaque on the estates office around the green.
My photographs today were taken in East Dean and also in the Seven Sisters Country Park where there were plenty of emergency vehicles - coastguard, police, ambulance. Nobody was panicking though and it all had the feel of an exercise as a stretcher was carried from the sea.