My partner, HB, having had a fit of lunch, was urging us to eat crumpets.

He had already thrown himself on the remaining crumpet left over from last week, slightly curled at the edges, which he claimed could change the life of a child in Bangladesh. In fact tens of thousands of underfed children in Bangladesh could be saved if only everyone would send the last remaining crumpet in the pack that no one will eat.

He then proceeded to depress himself by convincing himself that the great crumpet salvation delivery would surely be intercepted by corrupt officials who would end up sitting around, eating the now slightly green crumpets with the curled up edges saying “why do they send our children this crap to eat?” and throwing them over their shoulder for the starving children to pounce on anyway.

“Where are all these crumpets coming from?” I asked (ingenuously).

“It’s the great crumpet war”, he mournfully replied.

HB is the supermarket shopper in the family and has his eye out constantly for a bargain. He even buys Home Brand if he can get away with it.

Apparently the deal is this. Golden crumpets and Mightysoft had been having a crumpet war for quite a few weeks and were both selling their crumpets off at two packs for the price of one. This meant, crowed the triumphant HB that you could buy two packs of crumpets for $2, but if you only wanted to buy one packet, of either brand or type, it would cost $2.40. Therefore the only sensible thing to do was to take advantage of the crumpet fiasco to save 40 cents.

There is a catch to this of course. There always is. For two weeks the crumpets are the square ones you can split in two to make fingers, (good for melting cheese on and such). Then for one week, you can only get round ones then it’s back to the square, and so on.

This is causing angst within the family. Daughter is complaining of having an emotional crisis because she only likes the Golden square ones and the unpredictability of the shape and brand of crumpet was having a permanent effect on her psyche, possibly resulting in an anxiety neurosis costing hundreds of thousands of dollars of therapy to fix later on.

This also tends to put her off eating the wrong shape and brand of crumpet, resulting in more slightly curled and dried ones to send to Bangladesh and for HB to put out of their misery, thus lending centimetres to a girth which cannot afford it.

Son will only eat them with honey and HB will not buy honey 

I, the voice of reason, said, “Why can’t we just pay the extra 40 cents and buy the brand we like?”

HB pointed out that to do anything else but engage in the great crumpet war would be to fly in the face of prudent consumerism, not to mention sheer logic.

I am eating crumpets as I write. So far we have saved $2.40.