I worked out that is three and a half cups of Prêt á Manger filter coffee I need to stop drinking to make up for the shortfall in the monthly budget. It is a hard decision – give up Sky TV, or give up coffee – I know what I would go for, and what I will have to go for in the end.

Despite being the bill payer in our house, I am in an overwhelming minority of one when it comes to making this decision. Sky stays, coffee goes. So if you asked me, as a result of this piece of real life economics, whether inflation is rising, falling or staying the same, I would tell you categorically it is rising.

Interestingly, the price of Pret coffee has stayed at 99p for a number of years now, so on that measure I might say inflation is not rising at all.

In my opinion, this piece of real economics is a marginally more useful way of charting inflation than the measures used by the government, which includes the cost of a new sofa. How often do you buy a new sofa? Annually (definitely not), every five years (only if you have to), every ten years (more realistic).

So these measures, to my mind, are at best mildly interesting and at worst just yet another set of numbers that do not bear much relation to people’s real lives. What they do do, however, is set an expectation level, what psychologists call ‘an anchor’ as to what the public think inflation is. This, in turn, feeds through to the amount by which we think prices should rise or fall.

I have not done the maths yet, but I reckon £3.50 a month (I am not sure if that includes VAT) is more than 2.5% of my currently monthly bill, so it is an above inflation rise.

Either way, it is more money for a ‘service’ I barely use, so as soon as the last of the little Goslings has flown the nest, the subscription will be canned and I will feel like I have had a pay rise.

Our expectation of what inflation is to a certain extent drives what sort of pay rise we all feel we should get, which is why people feel a little short-changed if they get no rise or a below-inflation rise.

Clearly not a problem MPs or Premiership footballers have to wrestle with. They have an expectation of the world – an anchor – completely different from the rest of us. If you are a footballer your ‘anchor’ starts at around £50k a week.

So how do we capture or measure this expectation? Thankfully those very clever people at M&G on the Bond Vigilantes team have come up with the answer.

They have started a quarterly inflation expectation survey across Europe, which is one of the most simple and useful bits of research I have seen in years.

The takeaway is simple – whatever we think about inflation is irrelevant, it is what the consumers think that matters. And, judging by the survey, they are nervous, so perhaps we should all be investing slightly differently?

Lawrence Gosling is editorial director of Incisive Media