The 1976 Bread Line

In 1976, we rented a cottage in Monkstown Farm, near Dun Laoghaire Co Dublin.  The price was right - £60 / month - and it was huge: four bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room and a large weedy old garden behind and sort of a lawn in front.  At the end of summer it was idyllic.  I dug up a couple of kilos of dandelion root, chopped and dried them to make "coffee". The Boy was crawling and it seemed a fitly romantic place for him to grow a bit more.  Through all the moves, we've kept a hard-covered note book which starts optimistically with financial accounts for the new venture.  About three weeks later, the disciplined itemisation of the nature and cost of all the food we bought, dribbled off.  A couple of blank pages later, the book finds another use "SEPTEMBER 1984 RECIPES USED".

So I thought it might be interesting and even instructive to record the data for Dau.II as she manages her own culinary affairs a generation later.  I think what strikes us now is how simple it all was.  We got two pints of milk delivered to the house in glass bottles every day, occasionally three (you left a note out for the milkman in the empty bottles put out for collection).  The other thing is that there seems to be a helluva a lot of sugar consumed.  A pound of dabs Limanda limanda was 30p - less than a pound of hamburger and much less than a pound of cheese.  We shan't see those prices again.

The prices are all in decimal pence.  It was two-and-a-half years since we had moved from a truly medieval currency: 12 pennies (d for denarius) to the shilling (s for solidus); 20 shillings to the pound (fancy-L for libra) so called £.s.d.  These pennies must be multiplied by 1.27 to convert to euro-cents.  But we have lived through several cycles of currency inflation, so you can't buy a pint of milk for 7p anymore.  Nevertheless, you get money values so stuck in your head and it's hard to shake them.  The weekly total in the second table suggests that the three of us lived a week on £5.20: call it €6.65 in today's money.  So you can see why I used to blench when I saw graduate students, in the Celtic Tiger boom times, spending more than half that on a soda and sandwich for a single lunch.

I've looked up the Consumer Price Index at CSO.ie and WolframAlpha.  This has fluctuated quite wildly (the cost of stuff was rising at 20% in 1975/1976 and was going down, briefly, in 2009; but has been creeping up at an average ~5% over the last 37 years.  1.052^37 says that things are 6.5x more expensive now than then because of inflation.  The final 2 does matter here because of the ^37 exponent: 1.05^37 is only 6x. And you have to multiply everything by 1.27 for conversion to the Euro.  So multiply everything in the table by 8 (and a quarter if you're pedantic).  Call a pint (570ml) = half a litre and a pound/lb (450g) = half a kilo?
Milk 7 x 8 x 2 = €1.12/lt; Bread = €1.80 loaf; Sugar = €1.80/kg; kg of mince €4.50.
 Q. What do you reckon the 'eggs' are: 6x or 12x ?

And I should add that the romantic glaze fell from our eyes when winter kicked in.  The huge kitchen was impossible to heat properly and ruinously expensive to heat inadequately and we left the cottage the following summer.

p	Sat 18 Sept	p	Mon 20 Sept	p	Thu 23 Sept	p	Sat 25 Sept
28	mince	3.5	pepper	7	milk	15	oranges
22.5	sugar 2 lb	7	milk 1pt	9.5	margarine	10	1lb carrots
28	eggs	22.5	bread	13.5	beans	16	2lb onions
43	fish-fingers	23	onions	22.5	bread	15	1lb tomatoes
18	margarine x2	8	carrots	19	sausages	30	dabs
9.5	pasta	15.5	matches	20.5	sugar	15	1lb spinach
15	white pudding	60	cheese	27.5	eggs	18	1lb beans
12.5	beans	24	peas	12	biscuits	25	mince
17.5	onions	15	tomatoes	22.5	bread	19	margarine
		7	milk	13.5	beans	19	sausages

And more

p	Mon 27 Sept	p	Fri 01 Oct	p	Sat 02 Oct (cont)	p	Weekly Total
7	milk	22.5	sugar	14.5	oats	112	milk
60	cheese	15.5	white pudding	22	meat	70	bread
4.5	buttermilk	18	margarine	18	margarine	23.5	sugar
22.5	sugar	56	cheese	20.5	bread	48	margarine
	Wed 29 Sept	9	carrots	13	tin tomatoes	36	flour
16	lemons	5	buttermilk	14	milk x 2	100	cereals
20.5	bread	119	milk bill	10.5	peas	72	cheese
7	milk		Sat 02 Oct	5	pepper	60	eggs
14	onions	26	Toilet paper	7	lemon	??	beans
7	milk	14.5	salt			£5.20	Total