Mole encounter....

My wife called to me from the garden earlier today - from the kitchen window, she'd seen a magpie pecking at the grass out the back.  Nothing unusual about that, but it had suddenly jumped back and then turned and flown away, so she'd been out to investigate.

When I went outside, I could see the ground heaving slightly in the middle of our back lawn, so I grabbed the camera and a stool and sat close to it.  After around five minutes, the earth broke but the mole didn't seem to emerge.

the very small molehill

Beating inflation at a local level...

How much do macro-economic statistics actually matter to you ?

Take, for instance, the oft-quoted official rates of inflation.  They're maybe important if you've pension income or other similar indexed returns dependent upon them, but are these rates of price increase in any way rooted in the reality of your own particular existence ?

At the time of writing, the official rate of UK inflation is around 3.0%.  However, most of the money we spend on a regular basis goes on food items, for which the annual inflation rate on the items we buy is always many times higher than any 'official' rate.  We can see this just by pushing a supermarket trolley around – we don't need bodies of self-professed 'economists' to tell us.