Dean Frobisher, 28, of 11 Sculcoates Lane, Hull, has not slept properly since the seventeenth of September, when the Office for National Statistics announced that consumer price inflation had fallen to 2.1 per cent, down from 2.7, a development he regards as a personal slight of the gravest order. Your correspondent finds him outside the Combined Court on Lowgate at half past nine in the morning, holding a laminated A3 printout of the ONS bulletin and explaining, with the patience of a man who has explained it many times and found the world no better informed, that 2.1 per cent is ‘a lie told by a computer’. He has underlined the word ‘basket’ eleven times. ‘They pick the basket,’ he says. ‘Who picks the basket? I don’t pick the basket.’ He is wearing a Hull City shirt, which he says is not relevant.

The Bank of England has stopped replying to his letters

Mr Frobisher has written fourteen letters to the Governor of the Bank of England since June, beginning politely and deteriorating by degrees, as correspondence with institutions so often does, and receiving in return that particular silence which only a central bank can produce, a silence with a press office behind it. The first letter enquired whether the basket included ‘a pint in the Olde White Harte’ and received no reply. The sixth enclosed a photograph of his gas meter. The fourteenth, sent on the twenty-fourth of September, consisted of a single sheet of A4 bearing the words ‘STILL NOT OVER IT’ in biro.

“All fourteen items have been logged under customer feedback and a leaflet entitled Managing Your Money in a Changing Economy was dispatched on the twenty-ninth,” said Marjorie Cusworth, Head of Public Correspondence Review at the Bank of England.

Mr Frobisher says he has not opened it. He says he can tell what it says from the envelope, and your correspondent, who has opened many such envelopes and found them to contain precisely what the envelope promised, is inclined to believe him.

MKM Building Supplies moved him to nights after the forklift incident

At his place of work on Stoneferry Road, a yard of plasterboard and controlled despair, Mr Frobisher taped a printout of the CPI graph to the mast of his forklift and refused to remove it, on the grounds that it was ‘the only honest thing in the building’. His supervisor, Keith Rowntree, 54, asked him twice. Mr Frobisher responded by reading out the September minutes of the Monetary Policy Committee over the warehouse tannoy, at volume, to an audience of men loading insulation.

“He’s actually better on nights,” Mr Rowntree said. “Nobody has to look at him.”

He was moved to the night shift on the twenty-third of September, which he regards as a victory, and now stands in an empty yard from ten at night until six in the morning, surrounded by plasterboard, with the graph still taped up and a torch in his pocket for reading the appendices. One notes that the yard is quieter at night. One notes also that Mr Frobisher is not.

A hunger strike, a wedding and a Greggs on King Edward Street

On the first of October Mr Frobisher announced a hunger strike outside Hull Minster, effective immediately, a phrase which carried a certain liturgical weight until one recalled that it was being said by a man in a football shirt holding a laminated A3 printout in a light drizzle. By half past two he had eaten a sausage roll and a steak bake from the Greggs on King Edward Street, explaining that the strike had been ‘paused pending a review of the methodology’.

Earlier that week he had interrupted the photographs outside St Mary’s, Lowgate, to ask a bride whether she felt the figures reflected her experience of the cost of a marquee. The bride, Amy Rowntree, 31, said she did not. Mr Frobisher thanked her and walked off down the street with the printout under his arm, which your correspondent found, and finds, peculiarly difficult to forget, and she has tried, and she has a sherry about her person for precisely such emergencies, and it has not helped.

His mother says he was never like this before the internet

Yvonne Frobisher, 61, of Garden Village, says her son used to be ‘a normal lad who liked fishing’. She dates the change to a smartphone he bought in 2023. ‘He used to go to the match,’ she says. ‘Now he goes to the ONS website.’ She has asked him to stop. He has explained to her, twice, that the CPI is a chained Laspeyres index and that she would understand if she read the technical annex. She has not read the technical annex. She says she is more worried about the winter, and the boiler, and whether he is eating. He is eating. That is the one thing your correspondent can confirm.

It was on the third reading of the bulletin, outside the Minster, in the rain, that your correspondent began to suspect she had misjudged the whole affair, as one so often has, and that the young man with the biro might be correct, or at any rate no more wrong than the Bank of England, which has been wrong with considerably better stationery. The basket is picked by someone. The someone is not Mr Frobisher. One rather likes him. One shall not be saying so.

The boiler at Sculcoates Lane is fourteen years old and will not see another winter out, and the nights are drawing in, and the yard at Stoneferry Road is cold at four in the morning, and somewhere a committee is meeting to decide what a pint costs. Your correspondent has a small sherry about her person. It is nearly noon.