I felt like the eight-year-old whose outraged reaction to ice-cream van prices – “NINE POUND FOR TWO?” – went viral this summer on TikTok. Bill shock is normally what happens when our inbuilt sense of what things “ought” to cost can’t quite keep up with inflation. But all that said, it’s an uphill slog to generate a feelgood sense of life getting better under Labour when quite ordinary things increasingly feel to ordinary people like guilty extravagances. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.