When I first started collecting football stickers, in what must have been the late 1970s, a pack of five from Panini cost 5p.

For that five pence I got some additions to my album of some of the finest permed footballers of the day; this, let us not forget, an era when the likes of Graeme Souness and Alan Sunderland sported the most magnificent/ludicrous (delete as you see fit) hairdos.

So when my own children started collecting them when they reached a certain age, I turned into a proper parent; I stood flabbergasted at the price and started banging on about how much cheaper they were in my day. It was their first lesson in me being a bore and the power of inflation.

And, of course, inflation is a word we hear an awful lot about at the moment. More to the point, we feel it in our wallet. Especially today, when apparently we're likely to feel lots of price hikes.

But did things really cost that much less?

Well, if we use a handy little price inflation calculator online, then yes, I can conclusively say those football stickers have comfortably outstripped inflation.

A shiny five-pence piece back then (which used to be a proper size, not the tiddlers they are today) is worth about 35p today. The cost of a pack of five Panini stickers now? 80p. Granted, I imagine Panini probably pay a rather heftier licence fee for the use of the Premier League superstars, but still...

When I first started driving (a 1981 Volvo 343, in case you wondered - a car Jeremy Clarkson recently described as "possibly the worst car made by western Europe", which I feel is a little unkind) petrol costs were sufficiently low, that for a fiver, I could keep the fuel gauge comfortably out of the red.

Turning again to my good friend Mr Google, apparently a litre of petrol in the year I passed my test - 1990 - was around the 40p mark. Today it's around £1.50. Seems like a mighty leap. But the previously mentioned inflation calculator (which uses the Retail Price Index as its benchmark, should you care) suggests 40p some 33 years ago was the equivalent of about £1.20. So, yes it's higher, but not extortionately so.

When I was younger I used to smoke. And the packet I no doubt treated myself to celebrate passing my test would have cost about £1.40 for a pack of 20. If - as was more than often the case - I couldn't stretch to such a sum, then for about 75p I could have bought a packet of 10. They've phased those out now, on account of it - quite understandably - been a rather more economic way for youngsters to get hooked on the evil things.

Today a box of B&H is close to £16. £16! Quite how anyone can afford the habit any more is beyond me. Plus, for your money, you have to stare at a box with a blackened lung on it or something similarly unpleasant.

That £1.40 back then would be the equivalent of about £4.20 today. Heavily taxed in order to prevent people taking up the habit, it's fair to say prices back then were enormously cheaper (albeit the NHS is probably paying a sky-high price now).

Day trips to France could often be bagged for £1 if you took advantage of a special offer on the ferries too. Today the cheapest I could find for a foot passenger was £38.

As for concert tickets? Don't get me started.

When I saw Prince at Wembley Arena in 1988 the price for a ticket - in one of the front blocks - was a mere £16.50 - the equivalent today of about £55. When I saw him in Birmingham on his last UK tour in 2014, I splashed out more than £100. But that seems cheap to what the big acts charge these days.

Fancy seeing Madonna on her latest tour? If you go to the O2's official site, where a couple of seats remain for her London shows later this year, then you can get a seat near the back in the nose-bleed seats for, wait for it, £794. Yes, you heard that right. That's for ONE ticket. Those aren't secondary market ones...but through the official site. Ludicrous.

Apparently it is one of an increasing number of in-demand shows which deploys 'dynamic pricing'. In other words, if lots of people want a ticket, then the price rockets. That, ladies and gentlemen, is capitalism at its most difficult-to-swallow finest. Thank goodness they didn't have that in my day.

For the price of one Madonna ticket, you could have two in the front block for Elton John's O2 show tomorrow night, on his seemingly never-ending farewell tour.

I could go and bang on about how the cost of the first property I rented - a modern two-bedroom house with garden - set us back £350 a month in the mid-1990s. Or that the first property we purchased, a three-bed property, five minutes walk from the sea and high street in Whitstable, in 1999, cost £58,000 (that's around £130,000 today...which may buy you a beach hut in 2023...if you're lucky). But we'd be here all day. And frankly both you and I have better things to do.

The problem is while lots of things haven't really increased over time - a pint of milk is still less than £1 - plenty of things have.

And there's no sign of that changing any time soon. Yes inflation is going to slow...but prices are still going to be rising - just not at such an eye-watering rate. Hopefully.

Which means, if nothing else, another generation able to baulk at the price of things in years to come and reflect how much cheaper they were when they were young.