But no. Encouraged no doubt by the US government's ZIRP, the endless capacity for Turbo Tim and Black Hawk Ben to sweep it under their inner carpets and keep hitting 'print' like pellet-happy lab-rats, and the desperation among investors to find some kind of asset in which there is more than 0% return, cotton prices exceeded the '08 tops earlier this year and have since just kept going.
This has had a tangible and regrettable impact on the Wonderful World of Bumwad. In about 2004, Turnbull & Asser charged about £80 a pop for their off-the-shelf poplin shirts and £120 for Sea Island. This was at a time when Thomas Pink was around £65, for a distinctly inferior product, made in God-knows-what part of the Warsaw Pact.
Now, following yet another surreptitious price hike, Turnbull are asking £135 for the same shirt and £190 for Sea Island quality - and that is despite what appear to be slight alterations in manufacture (the collar band no longer has a central, lateral line of stitching) that could have been occasioned by costs.
Ditto for the lovely Mrs Willis, who has just raised her prices across the board. Not many years ago, her stock English cotton shirts were about £80; Swiss voile were about £95. When, having moved up in the world a notch or two, I ordered my first batch of bespoke shirts from her in 2007, they were £200 each. Now, her ready to wear shirts are £140; stock specials are around £190-290, and bespoke is £240 plus - and an eye-watering £350 for Sea Island.
Alexandra at the shop tells me it is not related to the recent poor cotton harvest in the US, the Asian subcontinent and Egypt. The resulting price hikes might indeed affect the margins of the lower orders of shirt-makers, but Mrs W's factory uses mostly Swiss and Italian cottons; and apparently much of the shortfall was made up by a bumper crop in Brazil. So the most recent increase was because they hadn't reviewed prices with suppliers for a couple of years, and the retail prices were becoming unsupportable. I can only speculate, but perhaps the continuing weakness of the pound sterling against the Euro plays a further part; and commercial rents in central London have of late been going up. Or perhaps Mervyn King - a man in a seemingly perpetual state of surprise about inflation - does her books.
Now I'm no opponent of austerity, and will happily surrender the absurd benefits granted under the Blair-Brown tyranny that were nothing more than painfully transparent attempts to bribe me with my own money. I'm ready to play my part, and admittedly this is scarcely a hard-luck story guaranteed to stimulate the already hyperactive lachrymal glands of the BBC News home affairs team. (Although, in his role as champion of the squeezed middle, I suppose the Rt Hon Edward Miliband might use my case to make a point at PMQs.) If I'm going to the soup kitchen, I want to look like I don't need to be there. Mrs W can relax for a little while longer: I have no intention of buying my clothes from outlet stores like Thomas Pink, Lewin or Charles Fuckwit. 'We're all in this together,' I suppose - but that should not apply to our shirts.
But I do wonder if Mrs W realises that a significant component of my loyalty to her derives from her fragrant demeanour and the prospect of a sympathetic smile on my occasional visits.
You get further with a kind word, a gun and some well-polished riding boots
than you do with just a kind word
I have no wish to drive her to penury, her children to the workhouse; but frankly, if she doesn't start putting in more time at the shop, I might have to move next door to Turnbull - where many of their floorwalkers appear rather more liberal with their attentions.
