The Blackberry Walk

About a month or so ago, I bought some cheese. I was on the high street in town, and went into a shop I hadn't been to before, since my parents who were visiting were interested. Inside, in this shop in our town, was a selection of fancy cheeses and charcuterie! I was surprised to say the least. And in that excitement, I ended up buying some fancy cheese. Some raclette cheese for raclette, and some Munster cheese, a cheese I had recently first tried on holiday in France. Munster cheese is commonly described as barnyardy. It tastes as if it were left amongst the straw in a stable of goats, and yet somehow it is quite tasty. "How much do you want?" asked the shopkeeper. "This here", she said placing the cheese on the scale, "is 500g." "Sure, I'll take that then", I responded. Little did I know, this cheese would cost as much as it did. Only once she brought up the price on the cash register, did I clock that the Munster cheese was £5 per 100g. It was too late to change my mind. With a heavy heart, I paid. I now had in my fridge an expensive cheese. This Munster cheese was to be prized, eaten sparingly, and each mouthful savoured. I made cheese on toast with it, but in an effort to make it go further, I debased the cheese with cheaper cheeses like Double Gloucester. I shaved slivers off the wedge to melt upon burgers, a very tasty combination, I must add. And every now and then I got my expensive Munster cheese out of the fridge to take a small corner off to nibble on. The 500g of cheese lasted weeks. I write of my mundane adventure with the cheese for a reason. Today, I want to discuss the nature of value, and what it means to value something. What, then, is value? Valuation is the determination of how much something is worth, so that it can be exchanged for something of equal or better value. When looking for a lover, we evaluate, and value up different partners; when looking for apples in the supermarket, we look at, and perhaps feel, the apples to see if they are of good quality; and when looking for a job, the process of cover letters and interviews is to determine the applicant's value. Value is everywhere. When we choose one route to London over another, we make a value judgement. When we choose one striped jumper to wear over another, we make a value judgement. A judgement ignorant of value is random, as fickle as the wind. The valuation of people, of things, of the world, is at every crossroad of our daily lives. As a society, there are methods by which valuation is achieved. The most obvious, is the stock market. Traders in banks and hedge funds trade commodities and stocks for what they think is a cheap value, in the hope of later selling it for a higher value. The bulls, as they are known, are those who believe a stock price is currently cheap, and believe its value will go up; whilst the bears believe it is currently expensive, and its value will go down. These two tribes go to war, and fight over the price, the price of the stock being how much people are willing to pay. And this figure, of how much people are willing to pay, is the current 'valuation' of that slice of a company, how much the market has decided it's worth. And these valuations change day by day, seemingly for no reason. They modulate and fluctuate in familiar patterns, much like Conway's Game of Life, these simple rules beget complex phenomena. This is a method of valuation for public items, but what about unique items? My girlfriend, RiceIsNice, has been watching a lot of mid-noughties Bargain Hunt lately. An older TV program, Bargain Hunt has two teams rummage through an antiques market, looking for wares they reckon can be bought on the cheap, and sold at auction for a profit. The contestants are also looking to buy low and sell high, but since the items are unique and non-fungible, a stock market model doesn't work to determine value. For antiques, the value is ascertained in the auction. No one going in knows how much any given item will go for at auction, but through the ritual of the auction, the crowd of buyers decide on amongst themselves on a valuation for the piece. Needless to say, in the show these amateurs rarely succeed. But strangely, the experts who advise each team don't do much better. The experts know so much about antiques, and how much they've been sold for in the past, but the auction house itself is the determiner of value. A genuine Faberge egg taken to Sotheby's will fetch more than at a small local auction down the road. From these two methods of valuation, there are two important lessons. The first is that valuation is at some level social. To develop a fair price for anything, whether it be a share or an antique pot, is virtually impossible in a vacuum, without a frame of reference. I can't calculate, even with a mountain sized calculating machine, the availability, demand, and supply chains of each thing I want to buy in the shops. Valuation is organic, and emerges from the arguments of merchants, who will always disagree. After all, one man's trash is another man's treasure. And then the second lesson is that everyone speculating on prices is clueless. The City trader and the antiques expert can rattle off a thousand facts and figures, but neither can prophesy whether the valuation will increase, or decrease. They're all as clueless as each other, counting birds and reading entrails. What has all this got to do with my Munster cheese, then? To start off, I thought I had overpaid, since my valuation of cheese, as formed by Tesco's, is quite low. I can get a similarly sized block of cheddar for £2. Compared to other foods, pound for pound, calorie for calorie, it was really quite pricey. But I enjoyed my Munster cheese quite a bit. Shaving off slivers, I realised I had not only gotten a lot of flavour out of my £25 wedge, but quite a lot of enjoyment out of it too. Maybe my valuation of this cheese was wrong all along? Not just my valuation, but my very attitude to valuation - the one presented above - might be quite wrong. In overpaying, I ended up valuing the Munster cheese far more than I would have otherwise. If it were cheddar, I'd chop off a big chunk to melt on some toast without giving a second thought, but this Munster cheese was expensive, it cost me top dollar, and I wasn't about to waste it all like that. The cheese became treasured, and in a sense, it became loved. Once sentiment enters the frame, valuation becomes opaque. Can you put a price on friends and family, on a wedding ring, or on a treasured family heirloom? Show me the man who would, outside of desperate circumstance, sell his beloved dog. They wouldn't because with sentiment, things can become invaluable, and for those thing we wouldn't give them up for the world. For a person or thing to be invaluable, no amount of money, goods, or experiences are enough to trade for them. No trader in the City sees his stock as invaluable, nor does any antiques dealer, since neither the trader nor the dealer have a personal connection to their assets. Only through love, through time, through that personal connection, does an item become invaluable. My experience with the cheese shows how by valuing our possessions more, they have more value to us. The Mediaeval peasant greatly valued his wheel of cheese, since a wheel of cheese was hard to come by. Even by the time of the Great Fire of London, Samuel Pepys famously buried his cheese, one of his most valued possessions, to protect it from the blaze. And yet, today, where food is abundant, and that cornucopia named Tesco's is a ten minute walk away, we have ceased to value cheese. Supply rose, but demand didn't meet it; the price plummeted, but more importantly, we don't value it as much. These market forces, these methods of valuation, determine not just the price of an item, but their perceived value too. With cheese as cheap as it is, we almost disrespect it. And then there are things that can't be bought and sold. How are we to value those, when pricing mechanisms are ineligible. Here, I'd like to shoehorn in my favourite Chesterton quote, a quote readers of this blog may have seen me post before: "Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde." So much in this world cannot be bought and sold to find a fair price, since so much of this world can't be owned. The sunset can't be owned. The sunset, seen by all each night, can't be captured, held ransom, and traded. This is as Wilde rightly points out. But as Chesterton rebuts in the quote, there is a fair price. Not dictated by a stock exchange, not dictated by an auction, but one dictated by God, the ultimate judge. And perhaps all the market forces discussed are but a concession. Through love of people, of animals, of plants, of things, perhaps everything living and everything inert will be deemed invaluable, just like the sunset. It seems far away. As Chesterton would say, we have yet to see the front side of the tapestry. But here, now, just like my Munster cheese, we can savour each sliver of beauty, kindness, and wealth we have on this Earth. Then we can appreciate the true price for which our ransom from death was paid.