The crust inflation index at the East Bank feeding point has settled, by our count at the close of Monday morning, to nine crusts to the hour. That is down three from the twelve recorded on the thirty-first of last month, and one above the eight at which the spring inflation calmed in late April, as regular readers will recall. The fall came on gradually, not all at once. It has followed the cooler air of the early week. And it has, in this paper’s opinion, far more to do with the seasonal habits of the feeding party than with anything done or even contemplated by any party of competent jurisdiction.
For that reason, and this paper thinks the reason worth setting down, we decline to claim that the editorial of the first instant had any practical hand in the easing now observed. That editorial was, readers will recall, only the second time this paper has reached for the formula “It is this paper’s considered opinion that…” We reached for it deliberately. The position it advanced was that the pressure reflected a failure of distribution rather than supply. A redistribution of feeding hours, it argued, might in time calm things. No party with the power to adopt that position has adopted it. The Subcommittee has neither commented on the editorial nor minuted it. The Clerk of the Exchequer was approached on Sunday afternoon and was, in our usual phrasing, unavailable for the usual reason. The index calmed without our help, the way indexes of this kind tend to calm in seasons of this kind.
A breakdown by feeding point, drawn from the best accounts to hand on Monday morning, runs as follows:
- East Bank: nine crusts an hour, the waiting line not reaching past the second reed.
- South Shore: eight crusts an hour, the previous month’s heel shortage having sorted itself by means we have not been able to verify.
- The Old Willow: seven crusts an hour, the bread there being, as ever, of a vintage that argues for restraint.
- North Bank: eight, on the word of a passing drake of no particular acquaintance who would not give his name.
Drake Halford’s seventh filing, lodged on the seventh instant, with its supplementary arithmetic of crust consumption (filed, readers will recall, in answer to the Household Adjoining’s letter of the third), has gone to the Clerk for the roll of Items of Continuing Interest. The arithmetic, we can confirm, did not prove the catastrophe the Household Adjoining had feared. The household’s reported nine crusts on the Monday in question sits, at the index now obtaining, inside a margin we would call respectable. The Household Adjoining has lodged no further note as of this writing.
The Travelling Drake, back at the pond for Lammas and through the days right after it, was seen at the east shore on Sunday afternoon and went off, by every sign available to us, for the upper bend at first honk Monday. He left no formal statement. On Saturday evening he had been heard to call the editorial “a beginning, though not, on the evidence, an end.” We let the line stand on its own. He took, we believe, no letter for the upper bend this time. By his own habit, he will be back.
We will keep watching the index through the rest of the week. The Lammas business is, as we read it, done. The index has done what indexes do. The Subcommittee has done what the Subcommittee does. And this paper has, for the second time in its history and to no visible effect this time, taken a position. The Clerk of the Exchequer is presumed to be somewhere else. The figure may yet rise again, and we will say so if it does.