A price remembered from childhood can make the present feel farther away than years suggest.

Old prices sit in the mind like fixed points. You remember what a loaf cost, or a bus fare, or a cinema ticket, and the gap between that number and today’s does something no calendar manages: it makes the distance feel physical. Time measured in decades stays abstract, and time measured in what a pound used to buy does not.

When that feeling arrives, notice that it is describing change rather than decline. Ask what has improved as well as what has gone. The past being cheaper is not the same as the past being better, though the two are easy to confuse.