3.8% Inflation - the highest for more than a decade

Now up until last Monday I didn't even know what a fund manager was but, having done some basic research on the internet, I gather that, broadly speaking, it's someone who manages people's savings and advises them on good business opportunities and investments.

I suppose it must be a bit like a financial consultant - someone who is well versed in the laws and nature of corporate finance, interest rates, share price index, Dow Jones, the rate of pound sterling and so forth.

Apart from getting me thinking about our undergraduate days - our idiotic dancing in the JCR to Echo Beach, The Housemartins and numerous other eighties bands - her contact with me has also inspired my thinking about international commerce and market economy. What is this thing that everyone keeps referring to as 'the credit crunch' for instance? And how is it that an intangible entity we call inflation (today worse than it's been for over 11 years) goes up and down - who or what causes this? How is it that house prices can rise just as much as they can stagnate and drop?

Now I understand that the price of certain purchasable commodities are based on the laws of supply and demand - stuff like petrol, rice, olive oil, foreign meat etc - but what governs the interest rates of borrowing or lending? Surely there must be people in the know - perhaps not unlike fund managers - who have a foresight to take their money, their investment, out of one company and put it into another and who know when to buy shares and when to sell them? Who or what is it that fuels their thinking into taking action? Is it purely a gut instinct, an inherent, intuitive component or is it - like I suspect - something deeper and based on the study of rationale and reason, effectively based on the relationship between international governments and their actions with or against one another?

It might sound as if I'm paranoid, but there are people who believe that there is a tiny, and rather exclusive, international group of people who benefit from the movement and collision of economies - who effectively prosper and are able to safe guard their wealth when countries are crippled financially, crunched to their knees.

With the recent and continuing rise in the price of food and fuel, I, too, am feeling that crunch and sensing like most people that my salary isn't getting me far. And every Saturday at our local Tesco store, I, too, can feel my temper burning at something or someone. Honestly, I have to control my desire to lash out at the hapless check-out operator.

Well, I'm having lunch with Helen on Regent Street on Thursday and although ostensibly I'll be chatting to her about our student days, a part of me will be itching to know about the world of international finance and our current state of the economy and say, 'Helen, dearest, what's this crunching business everyone's going on about, eh?'

That's if she doesn't slap me across the face for letting her down a quarter of a century ago. As William Congreve wrote, there's nothing like a woman scorned... So it's just as well that I'm meeting her in public - it might deter her from killing me should the urge arise!