Say what you like about 2014, but at least you knew what we stood for as a nation. We were a proud land of frozen-pizza-eating, satnav-using yoghurt drinkers, with a fondness for white emulsion paint. History recorded it as such in last year’s consumer price index, which collates popular shopping items as a tool to measure UK inflation.
It’s hard not to look back now on the 2014 era as a more innocent time.
“Hi Dave,” you would say to a colleague each morning, preferably one called Dave. “Enjoy a good frozen pizza last night?”
“I certainly did,” Dave would reply. “And I washed it down with a lovely yoghurt drink and pint of white emulsion paint.”
Skip to 2015, though, and this rose-tinted national identity lies in tatters.
For a start, frozen pizza – once the bedrock of food-based financial measurements – has been ditched, only to be replaced by that most unknowable of entities: “chilled pizza”. What does it mean? Is it a metaphor for the polar ice caps? Does it tell us something deep about who we really are in 2015?
Study the 2015 price index further and a clearer picture emerges of our new identity, one that says more than just “folk who like our pizzas at a slightly less cold temperature”. The new list includes such items as craft beer, e-cigarettes, headphones, music-streaming services and melon. City AM was quick to blame east London for all of this, saying that the government has “fallen for the influence of the kind of people who frequent the trendy parts of Shoreditch”.
Maybe I’m losing my edge, but the underground Hackney melon revival certainly passed me by. Likewise, there seems to be no occurrences of oversized plaid shirts or beard trimmers on the list, nor modern crazes such as selfie sticks. In fact, the rest of the list is made up with things such as liver, sweet potato, protein powder and non-white emulsion paint.
So … a body-building hipster who likes offal and has got seriously bored of their white bedroom. Does that sound like you? Or anyone you’ve ever met? Either way, you’d better get used to your new identity before it all changes again, quite possibly to one that includes a fondness for lukewarm pizza.
