HOW capitalism works part 78: now that staycations have become popular, prices have risen exponentially for such holidays. This week, it emerged that someone – a Tory councillor, indeed – had been quoted £71,000 for a week in a three-bedroom modern house in St Ives, Cornwall.

Many of you, I’m sure, are bleeding-heart liberals who cavil at my calls for corporal punishment and the imprisonment of most of the populace, with a jail at the end of every street and a gallows in every hamlet and suburb.

But surely even you must agree that the crook charging this amount of money should be made an example of. And he or she isn’t the only one. Other stories emerged of a caravan in Cornwall costing £3,000 a week and a house in Windsor wanting £4,500 – a night! Crazee.

Though never having had a week off work since 2008, staycations are the sort of periods away – same routine, different scenery – I had even pre-Covid, in latter years staying free at friends’ homes. But, very recently, when trying to get away, usually to view a property on the market in the middle of nowhere somewhere, I find I can’t afford the mental rentals for staying locally.

B&Bs used to be way cheaper than hotels, but now there isn’t much in it. You often see them at more than £100 a night. It’s like the football, which has long gone financially doolally. Someone worked out that, adjusting prices in a certain year in the 1960s or 1970s (sorry, can’t remember which one; maybe you could look it up; I’m too busy writing this) for inflation, it should cost around £8.50 to get into a Scottish game today rather than the £23 charged, never mind whatever mad prices they pay in England.

And £8.50 sounds about right for watching 20 balloons boot a ball skywards through the micturating rain, on a cold and dreary day, where the only warming sustenance is a lukewarm pie filled with some nameless grey substance or a half a pizza made of polythene.

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Similarly, my guess is that a B&B with carpets that remember rationing should be around £35 a night max. To be fair, you sometimes see decent places around that price.

But, otherwise, here’s what’s happened: as with tradesmen, while inflation has been negligible in recent years, many such businesses put up their fees annually by a big whack, as if we were living in 1930s, hyper-inflated Germany and people carried their cash in wheelbarrows rather than wallets.

As a result, the relationship between holidaymakers’ earnings and holiday landlords’ charges is now hopelessly out of synch.

Another disgraceful aspect of this, as with all tourist marketing, is the taking of liberties with the truth, such as holiday landlords saying their two-roomed property can sleep up to eight people. What are they doing? Stacking them?

My solution to this problem has been carefully thought through and is loosely based on all my previous solutions: nationalise the B&B and holiday cottage sector. It would be for the best all round. B&B landladies would acquire the status of minor civil servants, with pension rights and a free monthly allowance of stationery.

Prices for punters would be kept low, thanks to enhanced taxation of the obscenely rich earning more than £30,000 a year. Holidays should be a time of gaiety and laughter, where punters can happily have an ice cream or donkey ride without worrying about the additional cost.

They should not be times of monetary stress. Getting away from it all should not mean being dropped in it financially. Time for the benevolent socialist state to step in, with appropriate periods of incarceration for those resisting.

Football fanaticism

THE current international football tournament, due to end tomorrow, has been a disturbing event. In an ill-advised move, the authorities let “fans” (fanatics) into the stadiums, and their behaviour has been demented.

Television viewers have witnessed displays of extreme patriotism, with people crying during their national anthems. Bellowing other songs and chants fiercely, they bare their teeth like aggressive chimpanzees. Children emulate their parents, growling, waving their fists, pumping their arms. It’s disgraceful.

Anyone behaving like this in a crowd in the 1960s, when many men still wore ties to the game, would have been referred to the authorities for psychiatric treatment (in those days, a bracing and manly electrical shock to the brain).

If I go to the footer, I support my team by politely applauding, perhaps as much as three times during a game. If particularly moved, I might shout: “Try to run more swiftly!” But it never goes further than that.

Another disturbing development has seen English broadcasters becoming as bad as Scottish ones for saying: “Never mind the football. What about the fans, eh? Such singing!” Football is not, and never has been, about the fans.

They ruin players’ concentration with their inane racket and are only let in after being fleeced for a large amount of money at the gate. Alas, the return of supporters to the football is another blow to the excellent anti-social civilisation brought about by the extreme and unfortunate means of a pandemic.

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Back off, bacteria

I’LL be frank with you, readers: I’ve had it up to here with bacteria. You can’t move for them. They’re on kitchen surfaces, in the lavvy, they’re even in your stomach, and they carry briefcases full of viruses, which they empty down your throat at any opportunity.

I don’t know why we put up with them. The latest intelligence this week is that we need to remove them all from the house. A recent trendy view was that we shouldn’t “over-sanitise” our homes because it didn’t give our immune systems the opportunity to stay fit, and led to ailments such as asthma, eczema and food allergies.

But now they’re saying that it’s actually the cleaning products that are causing these conditions, and so we should get on with keeping the place spotless. What with? Saliva?

I’m too busy to clean the house anyway. I have mice to keep the floors free of dropped food and sundry detritus, though I was surprised only this morning to find they hadn’t touched a small pile of Bombay Mix that I found under a sofa cushion. Too spicy for them, I guess.

Fool circle

I WILL not be growing a circle beard. This affectation is reportedly sweeping the globe. It consists of framing the face with hair on the chin, up the cheeks and over the top of the forehead in a thin line, with the rest of the cranium left bald.

Critics have lambasted it as “a new level of wrong”, worse than a mullet, and looking like a toilet seat. So it’s bound to catch on. What a palaver we make of hair, and have done since ancient times.

More recently, I’ve lamented having hair at all, and have started to envy the bald. No washing or combing for them. No bad hair days or stylistic disasters. And women drool over them, believing them brutal savages, and not wimpy, poetic types like those of us with full thatches.

I would wear a hat, but don’t suit any of these other than a sombrero. As I’ve learned through bitter experience, discotheques and parliaments will not let you in wearing one of these. And, at the football, they get stuck when you’re trying to go through the turnstile.

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