on black bread

Unlike me, my father is a proper Scot. He claims bargain hunting is simply engrained in his DNA. Once in Manila we walked by a Diesel shop and my father said “lets go in and see what is on sale” although there was no obvious sign of any sale. Some 30 minutes later, after intense negotiations, we left with several leather belts which had been 40% off, and which my father talked down further until they became 60% off. I am wearing one now. He can haggle anyone vendor down by some margin: even if he doesn’t speak their language, he uses facial expressions to mysteriously push down the price.
At home where he lives he is something of a known quantity. He can tell you the price of anything in any local supermarket, and he knows every offer on at any moment. When he travels with me, we end up in random conversations, and sometimes even going for drinks with people he has met whilst discussing prices. I once left him alone in Punta Arenas, Chile for about 10 minutes, and when I came back he was drinking a coffee with some Chilean pensioners, discuss the price of salmon. My friend Conar noted that discussing prices is the Scottish generic conversation equivalent to the English standard comments on the weather. He might be right, but I maintain my father is an extreme case.
Yet what baffles me is his blind spot when it comes to Russia. Every time he visits me in Britain (which is rare) he complains endlessly about how overpriced everything is. But he consistently refuses to believe me when I complain about overpricing in Russia. His Russia is frozen in time, somewhere back in the Brezhnev era. When I try to persuade him, he claims I find it expensive because I live in a business traveller bubble. Maybe. But I am the same business traveller in Moscow that I am in Rome, Paris or Madrid- and Moscow is way more expensive than any of those. If I persist in my views, he insists that if only HE were there with me, he would ferret out good bargains. The last conversation on the matter ended with the argument ending declaration “well, you just don’t understand because you never faced down Adolf.” Once any conversation moves to the War, I know it is time to change topics.
Now I have decided to take scientific measures to prove my point. In doing so, I have been partly inspired by my childhood friend C. C works for some government agency (I forget which) and she monitors inflation. This involves getting pensioners, much like my father, to go around supermarkets and note down prices. If the pensioners she recruits are anything like my father, they were probably doing this anyway- C just makes sure they get paid for it. Presumably this information then gets compiled into some sort of database for government purposes. My aims however, are strictly personal. So I have started gathering receipts from grocery trips to different cities and taping them into the little black book I always carry on me. I then use it as concrete evidence to demonstrate to my father that he is allowing nostalgia to warp his bargain drive. Yet despite the presence of concrete evidence demonstrating that rice cakes in central London cost 85p, whilst in central Moscow they are £3.30, my father still refuses to accept my argument. “Man does not need rice cakes. If you had lived through the war, you would have looked at the price of black bread.” Probably I should give up, I sense this is a battle I shall never win.