The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - Bonus - The Vimes Boots Index

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is usually a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, a quick bonus episode about Jack Monroe, and the Vimes Boots Index.Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretWant to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi ResourcesThe Trussell Trust - Stop UK HungerWhat to do if you need emergency help with money and food - StepChangeThings we talked aboutJack Monroe’s original Twitter thread Call for evidence thread (for Vimes Boots Index)Terry Pratchett estate backs Jack Monroe’s idea for ‘Vimes Boots’ poverty index - The GuardianYour best ally against injustice? Terry Pratchett [by Marc Burrows]- New StatesmanIceland commits to price freeze on £1 value range as food costs rise - The GrocerCost-of-living crisis: Jack Monroe hails ONS update of inflation calculations - The GuardianRachael Hamilton says food bank users 'less well educated' on cooking – The NationalJack Monroe’s stuffBlog/recipes: Cooking on a BootstrapTwitter: @BootstrapCookJack Monroe books - Hive.co.ukMusic: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

I don't know why I'm talking, because we'll probably just start with an opening, right? Hello and welcome to the treat shall make you fret, a podcast in which we're usually reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series one time in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagan. And I'm Francine Carroll. And this is a very special bit of bonus episode. We are coming to you very quickly to talk to you about Jack Monroe and the newly formed Vimes Boots Index. We're in, we're out. We've got hot news of the press. And then we're in, we're out, shaking it all about. Good, this is starting well. Okay, yeah. So I don't know how many of you guys followed Jack Monroe. She's an author of budget recipes. And she's a prominent

campaigner against poverty and inequality in the UK. So I've used her recipes for years and years. She had a blog and she's got recipe books. She has very good recipe books. Yeah, they're fantastic. And they are really like budget down to the penny recipes and good food still, you know. And I've been really interested in kind of seeing her political influence grow. She's obviously a very good writer and cares very much about inequality. Yeah. The Vimes Boots Index is something of a brainchild of Jack Monroe. And this started, I'm going to say a couple weeks ago now. 19th January. Thank you. Yes. On the 19th January, she tweeted a thread about rising cost of living in the UK,

which is a topic that's been in the news a lot. And the radio was talking about the cost of living rising a further 5%, which is tricky enough as it is for people on low income. But as she pointed out, that doesn't really reflect the reality of inflation as it affects the forest in society. Did you look into like how this inflation cost is calculated? That's the kind of thing I'd write about for the old corporate nonsense. Did you look into it? I looked into it because some people were tweeting about some of the ridiculous price increases that are included in this, which like cost of champagne, okay, fine. You don't have to be rich to buy a champagne. Yeah, but you're not going to be.

Equestrian shit? Like... Was there a question shit? I haven't looked at it for a while. I may be making this up. Bedroom furniture was one of them. Bedroom furniture, stablage fees or whatever that's called. Stabling. That was like how much a cost to pay a place to look after a horse you own, which is a concern for many of us because I don't have any way to keep a horse in this flat. Yeah, it's true. Neither do I have a place to keep my champagne, which I don't have any of. So that's all right. How much does it cost to stable a champagne? Well, so mine lives on the little shelf like behind my bread bin above my washing machine.

And I hear straw costs a lot more now. How much straw does your champagne? Well, I like to keep it nestled in a box of straw for a fancy presentation. Yeah, but it doesn't eat much. It doesn't eat it. No, okay. So, as Jogman wrote, elaborated in this thread, which went massively viral, millions and millions of people viewed it. If you like a power Twitter user, you can see views as part of our analytics now, I think. And she pointed out using examples from her local supermarket, which is ASDA, one of the big four, that this time last year in ASDA, the cheapest pasta was 29p for 500 grams. Today, it's 70p. That's 141% price increase. And lots of examples along those

lines got rice, bread, that kind of thing. At this point, it's probably worth pointing out that this is more true for ASDA than the other big three at the moment, because ASDA is following a deliberate price increase strategy to change their demographics, which Jack Monroe is now kind of digging into as part of the investigative bit. However, the others are also going up in price, obviously, and it doesn't change the fact that what we need to use to calculate the impact on the poorest in society is not this one size fits all inflation index, which is fine as like a general indicator of some things. But it is not helpful for dealing with the people who suffer the most from inflation. It may not be massively as much the other big four, but it's true across the

line, not just with... So the big four for UK and abroad distance, I guess, is Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury's, Morrison's. Morrison's, yeah, yeah. But it's also the basic value ranges that are disappearing. So every one of those has always had some kind of most basic, this is like the off-brand, the cheapest version, supermarket-owned brand you can get. Used to be Tesco value. Yeah, Tesco value as the basic, Sainsbury. That's the face. And yeah, you're quite right, yeah, because something else she pointed out is that during this time, during the last few years, luxury ready meals and the meal deals

haven't really increased in price a lot. And so people who are on a comfortable salary, which I must say is increasingly fewer people because it's the cost of living rise. People who used to be on what was considered a decent salary are now struggling to make ends meet. So people on the most comfortable salary haven't had to deal with the increase of food costs as much as people who rely on, say, the basics ranges, because supermarkets are putting those cost increases into their cheapest ranges rather than into their, say, mid-range and higher-end ranges. Yes. And I don't know what the difference is in how many Tesco's essentials have disappeared

in comparison to Asda. I'm sure it is more on Asda because it's the same, but I mean, I have personally found it a lot more difficult to shop cheaply in the last few years. For sure. For sure I have. Just stuff like, basic stuff like stock cubes, you can't get a few for a few pence anymore, which you definitely used to be able to. Yeah. All of that. I've found exactly what Jack has been saying. The higher-end stuff I buy hasn't really shifted in price or that much. I will spend a bit more on things like meat because I try and make sure it's

from an ethical source. That's obviously a whole other argument, but I'll at least look at something with a clear supply chain. So I don't tend to buy Tesco value mints, say, although I don't think that's a thing anymore. But then, obviously, I shop really cheaply on essentials like cleaning products. That's been a fucking huge increase. Yeah. Savers is still all right, but... But then you've got to, again, it's like geographical access. Savers is fine if you are physically capable of walking to a town and going to one. A lot of people argue against this. Well, it's not that bad because places like Aldi and Little are still cheap and it's like, yeah, but you've got to be able to physically get to a supermarket and get around it.

Yeah. And either have a car or someone with a car because I think Aldi and Little don't even do delivery today. No. And then most of the places that do do delivery, they charge you extra for that. And that's like that five pounds is potentially like protein for a week for one person. Yeah. I'm sure they're massively problematic in lots of ways, but a little shout out to Iceland who do free delivery over a certain price point, but who have also committed to make their one pound line stay the same price through the rest of this year, which none of the others have like put any kind of commitment for their value ranges. And the CEO director, something like that, was very honest when he was talking about, we've lost some of our customers to hunger.

Yeah, we've lost our customers to food banks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like people aren't just going to a competitor. They are just not buying food now. Yeah. And that is, yeah. And the fact that he would admit that in a thing is quite good, I think. But the point is that Jack Monroe is now building a new index and she's calling it the Vimes Boots Index based on a quote from Men at Arms. Do you have the quote to hand? I do. I went and found it. Joanna, our voiceover artist has also, I've just been talking way too fast for too long and we'll take a short sip of coffee. Listeners will probably remember this quote because we talked about it a lot when we covered Men at Arms. The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less

money. Take Boots, for example. He earned $38 a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost $50. But an affordable pair of boots, which was sort of okay for a season or two, and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about $10. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the souls were so thin, he could tell where he was an angmorpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford $50 had a pair of boots that had still be keeping his feet dry in 10 years time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent $100 on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the captain,

Samuel Vimes Boots theory of socio-economic unfairness. And we've talked about that quite on the podcast before, when we did Men at Arms. And the concept that it is expensive to be poor, because it is. It is, horribly. It costs a lot more to buy things in small packages. And when you don't have the money spare, then you stop by the big packages, it costs a lot more to repeatedly buy cheap things. I can't remember if I tweeted this in the end, I meant to, I might have just left it in drafts. But the whole thing reminded me very much of when I was waging. And when I bought, when my grandma eventually bought me a pair of Clark shoes, and my quality of living went up immeasurably, because A, my feet no longer hurt. And I was no longer going through a pair of what

was it, six pound pumps from priceless shoes every month that I was doing when I was waging. And just the fact that I had a grandma who could buy me Clark shoes when I was 19 years old. Couldn't afford them. And oh, God. I can't be, I can't imagine being my age and working in those fucking 10 pound pumps. Yeah. Lots of people do. Yeah. And the same thing when I was working as a chef, I kept buying like 10 pound pairs of trainers that would wear through. Because you're on your feet in them for eight hours a day. And I would be literally working with in a kitchen in trainers with holes in the feet. And kitchen floors are gross. Yeah, they are. It was unpleasant. So I got to a point where I could afford decent work shoes. When I had other people working with me

who couldn't afford a decent pair of work shoes, I ended up going and buying them for them. That was when I was working somewhere where the pay was shit. The last place I worked, they were pretty good about what they didn't do pay increase in rate in like in line with national inflation. But there's a low bar. There's a low bar. But they did do fair pay. So Jack Monroe is basing her new index, or is calling her new index, the Bimes Boots Index, after this fantastic quote, which has been much shared around the internet, even by people who aren't massive project fans. As of January 25, I've seen they were talking before, but the practice date like officially authorized the use of the title for the Bimes Boots Index. Jack also

said that day like the ONS, the Office of National Statistics, were having a meeting with her and they have done now and the ONS are working to look at a better way of calculating inflation rates. And they say they were doing anyway, but I don't know about that. And yeah, it's been all over the media. I don't know whether I'm just hyper aware of it because it's obviously... We live on Twitter. Yeah, we live on Twitter and our algorithms are really slanted towards this kind of politics and something Pratchett related. Exactly, yeah. Like even if I didn't live on Twitter, eight different people have sent me this with that. Have you seen this? Are you aware of this? Including me just in case, yeah.

Yeah. Which I keep them to say like, funnily enough, as a Pratchett fan who's also a massive Jack Monroe fan, I have two signed books of hers and a painting that you got me and... She wrote you a birthday card. She did and I have it on a little shelf and I love it deeply. And yeah, so by the way, we'll put a couple of links in the show notes. Jack Monroe is asking for outside help in building this. She has some really good statisticians working with her on it, but they need data. They need evidence from people, so receipts from the last 10 years, basically, from people who shop at the Big Four. And Rihanna Pratchett has spoken about it. I think she was in the Guardian article. Have you got that to hand? Yes, I have. My father used his

anger about inequality, classism, xenophobia and bigotry to help power the moral core of his work. Vimes is musing on how expensive it is to be poor via the cost of boots was a razor-sharp evaluation of socioeconomic unfairness, one that's all too pertinent today, where our most vulnerable so often bear the brunt of austerity measures and a cast adrift from protection and empathy. While we don't have Vimes anymore, we do have Jack and Dad would be proud to see his work used in such a way. I think Rihanna Pratchett's called it a little-added practically in anger, that quote, which, yes, it does sound very clipped in that way that Pratchett sounded when he was angry. It is, I feel like there's some obvious echoes in there. Yeah. Something ripples

in the world. So, also, Mark Burroughs, hotter off the press still, has published an article in the New Statesman about this, and Mark Burroughs, if anybody is still ignorant, is our art flat and the writer of- The magic of Terry Pratchett, very good Pratchett biography. As Mark says, Pratchett understood human psychology, sociology and economics as well as any author since Dickens and was angrier and funnier about it than most of them. He was also super naturally well read. The Vimes boots theory is an elegant distillation of an old economic and philosophical concept famously explored by Robert Tressel in his classic 1914 book, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, which is excellent. And I like the fact that Pratchett has managed to

distill it in such a way that, like, all of us get it. Everyone gets it. You can just fucking retweet a screenshot of Pratchett's quote and everyone gets what he means. And yeah, it's amazing. So, Mark's article is very good and has done what we've just done. Much more eloquently and concisely. So, I will link that and you must go and read it. And then send Mark some love and tell him how good his writing is. Yeah, all of this. I don't want to say it's nice that this has been used for this because obviously it's not nice that this is needed. Yeah. But I think it's, as it is needed, it is good that Pratchett expressed it so well and that the legacy can be used for something that is going to be for good.

Yes. And I am very glad that the estate is so behind it. And I mean, obviously, Brianna Pratchett would be, I guess, like everything I know about her would say she is. Yeah. And yeah, I don't know, it's been a kind of source of anger and not happiness, but hope the last few days, isn't it? Because I mean, the more that's highlighted, the more you're like, oh, fuck. Yeah, it's very, everything is bad, but also look, something is happening, something is being done, someone is doing the work. Yeah. I've been politically tweeting a lot more than I usually do recently. I go through little phases. Yeah. This is spucked. Spucked some.

You've had a politic. I've had a politic. I have. I've had a little anger, a little politic, basically along the lines of, it is so fucking hard to get people who've never experienced kind of food insecurity, financial insecurity, to understand this stuff. They're always saying, I mean, there was this Scottish MSP today, who, well, I don't think she's got issues in MSP, who's going on about how was it people use food banks just, you know, aren't educated enough about how to cook and prepare food. I fucking hate this narrative so much because say, if you think they're not educated enough, then campaign for social change where better food education takes place. And B, you

don't get that you can't fucking bulk buy pasta if you're poor. Yeah. Yeah. If you have a quid, you cannot buy that much cheaper 20 kilo bag of pasta to live off. Yes, it doesn't matter if that bigger bag is less per 100 grams, you do not have the two pound, three pound, four pound to buy it. Yeah. And also, if you've been slogging around, like applying for your six jobs a day so you can keep fucking universal credit, which is not enough money to live off, you do not have the energy to also buy the cheaper dried lentils that you have to go to a special shop for and soak for three hours to cook. You may not have the fucking gas to be able to cook a cheaper cut of meat for a long time,

say. That's it. I mean, these these recipes by Jack Monroe, I mean, they have stuff like, and this is how long you have to keep the oven on for if you're worried about electrics, like that is the kind of the kind of penny counting I think people really who haven't done it don't understand unless they really go out of their way to try and understand it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, like fucking insinuating that people who use food banks don't know how to cook is just big, like, bollocks I've ever heard. Like, you know what, we got really fucking good at learning how to make stuff from whatever was in the house. And you know, I hate doing that now. So I often don't. And I spend more on groceries than I can really afford

to because I just fucking hate like giving the house for a little bit left of rice or lentils or whatever and making food from that. Because, you know, I, I now I'm not economically insecure and I'm not food insecure. I will spend more than I need to and make bigger things because I can in a way that I couldn't at certain points in my life. It's depressing. Anyway, yeah, so we did say we'll keep the shorts. We will listeners, we want to hear about your thoughts on this, unless they're just like yelling at us in which case, like, I've had a busy week, you know, I don't know when this is coming out, actually, I'm going to try and turn it around as quickly as possible because it's like news,

it's news. Yeah. And everything might change from between like, I'm looking at Twitter now as there's some stuff we haven't covered because stuff changed since this morning and now. But tell us your thoughts, tweet us. Don't massively tweet Jack because they seem quite busy at the moment. I think they're being pretty good about not letting anyone reply to their tweets. I can reply. They follow me on Twitter, which I only noticed this morning when I went to check one of the tweets. Is that so? Yeah. Nice. That was a random surprise. But I don't say I have nothing to say. But if you have receipts and you can take part in the data collection part of it, we'll share the information found to do that down below.

But yeah, share your thoughts, share your stories if you're comfortable sharing them, to help us spread awareness. And if you've got a spare fiver, maybe give it to the Trussell Trust because they should not need to fucking exist. But right now, they need to exist. Or drop stuff off at your local food bank if that's more accessible or whatever. Or drop stuff off at your local food bank, yeah. Lots of supermarkets have like little bits at the front that you can. They have a food bank collection area and yeah. Oh, this sucks. But God, it sucks. Also, if you are going to do that, have a look because quite often your local food bank will state what they need and don't need.

Do you have any idea how much food gets wasted in this country every day while the people also using food banks? Oh, yes. I mean, you've worked supermarkets. We both worked hospitality. I've seen so much cake just be thrown away. I've seen so much food. So much food. So much fresh produce. I mean, when you worked at Patisserie Valerie, you brought me a lot of that cake. I tried to save some. Oh my God, though. And yeah. Nothing will anger me quite as much as the memory of Marks and Spencers at Christmas Eve after the shop were closed. And once the staff have been allowed to go through and rinse everything, shit got thrown in the bin. Like turkeys, whole fucking turkeys. Anyway, we have fabbled on for

a lot. Listeners, thank you for listening. Yes, if you did, well done. If you did, well done, you. Love you. And yeah, we're on Twitter at makeyfretpod. Email us as well if you like the true show makeyfretpod at gmail.com. And we're on Facebook at the true show makeyfret and Instagram at the true show makeyfret. You can tell I don't have it in front of me. That's cool. That's cool. That's cool. Does anyone ever reach out by Instagram? That's what I want to know. You get the odd comments and things. Oh, that's nice. Cool. Yeah. Cool. Hi, Instagram followers specifically. Hi, Instagram followers. Anyway, yes. Thank you very much. Don't be detained. Don't be detained. Bye.

I'm not hanging up on you, Joe. We've got other things to do. Bye. We have got other things to do. Bye, listeners. Awesome. Well done. Also, I'm slightly worried that we should have been using gender neutral pronouns for Jack the whole way through. Jack's happy with she, her or they? Okay, good. Because it didn't say in there bio. I did. No, I googled before we started. Ah, thank you. These damn pronouns. At least that was the case last time they spoke about it. Didn't have pronouns when I was young. No. I also saw someone on TikTok today describe their gender as like girl, but if you ordered girl from Wish and I've never related to anything harder.

It was like, oh, we have girl at home. Your cardigan, it took me three attempts to put on the right way around. The nailed it of gender. What is your gender? Fuck.