The price of coffee

Coffee, & its price, really did hold some sort of fascination for the 1950’s intellectual – yet another piece of evidence comes from a letter which VS Naipaul wrote to his father in December 1951:

I have also acquired the habit of having … coffee at 11 pm in The Randolph, Oxford’s most expensive Queen’s Park hotel, where the coffee costs a shilling a time.

Those were the days, when a status symbol could be had for a mere 5p.

On the assumption that today’s intellectual pays about £3 for his coffee, that’s an inflation rate of some 7 per cent a year over 6 decades. Wonder if their salaries have done better than that?

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