One of the leaders of the march on Parliament last week said of his members: "We are suffering." To judge by the girth of a great many of those around him, the only thing they were suffering from was indigestion.

A degree of perspective is always helpful. The people in Burma are suffering. The people in Darfur are suffering. Bermudian workers are being mildly inconvenienced.

Whatever slights my brothers and sisters in solidarity may have suffered from what the Fox Network might call "When Governments Go Wild", they ain't seen nothing yet.

World food prices are about to increase. That will come as bad news for Bermuda, where prices have already begun to shoot through the roof in anticipation.

Some examples: in the last 10 days, rat cheese (as mentioned by my colleague Martha M.), has gone from $5.99 a pound, to $6.99 a pound, and now to $7.29 a pound. I checked with friends in the UK and US: rat cheese had not gone up at all in the past six months in either place.

A small loaf of Pepperidge Farm raisin bread, admittedly a speciality item, now costs $6.16 in the supermarket where I used to buy it. A loaf of Nature's Own bread, by no means a luxury item, three-quarters of the way to being stale by the time it hits the shelves, suddenly costs $5.25. I don't know if the cost of these goods to the supermarkets selling them has gone up correspondingly yet, but I doubt it. It feels to me a lot like supermarket executives have heard the international media shriek about prices rising following the increase in the cost of oil, and have moved to boost their prices and their profits. Their thinking may be that as real price increases follow, consumers will already be acclimatised to the idea.

A different example: I ate two meals out in the last two weeks. One was awful, at a Hamilton steak house that sold me and a pal cold steaks and some inedible fries for $106. The other was at a big hotel just outside Hamilton, known for its high quality, where three of us had our fill of great food for $76. Either way, the "service charge" included in the total was 17 percent. That's a trend started, I believe, by Blu, that everyone in the business will probably adopt. I'd bet you a pound of rat cheese the staff won't be seeing the extra two percent in their paycheques.

My cost of living according to my records, is up just over nine percent this year and we're only half-way through. If Bermuda were reasonably priced in the first place, that wouldn't matter so much, but it's already one of the most expensive places in the world. My guts say: "Flee, and keep fleeing until you reach another planet, any planet."

Being as, two weeks ago, I became the world's oldest man, this doesn't matter much to me. I'm done, what's left merely an echo of my youthful adventures. But you lot, well, you're in trouble. No one is looking out for you, and as George Carlin said on a DVD I watched after his death was announced: "The modern economy is a club, and you're not in it."

Food riots are not unheard of in this world, although in Bermuda, with its wealth, they would be bizarre, to say the least. (Perhaps no more bizarre than what we saw last week, but let's keep moving.) I say this because once the supermarkets actually start receiving invoices with higher costs on them, and once the effects of the gas price increase kick in (they haven't yet), that $6.16 loaf of bread is going to seem like a fond memory.

Any number of things could be done, few of them any good.

Good luck, my fellow residents. The end is not nigh, but for the average Bermudian it's nigher than it was.

The international companies are outsourcing or leaving for Switzerland; local companies are being unnecessarily taxed to death.

That's cheery, innit? See if the following makes you laugh.

* * *

Some years ago, you may recall, a competition of some sort was held to choose a national anthem for Bermuda. A winner was selected, if memory serves, although I'd bet you 10 pounds of rat cheese and half a dozen rats that you couldn't sing it out loud, right now.

At the time, in another column, I put forward the idea that the national anthem should be "Last Train to Clarksville". It wasn't an especially kind suggestion. It was also a little too esoteric, and the idea wasn't even mine. I stole it from a bearded buffoon with whom, at the time, I would sometimes hang.

It seems that the concept of a Bermudian national anthem lodged itself somewhere deep in the addled grey matter that is my brain. Last week, out of nowhere, I cracked the code and was able to definitively name Bermuda's national anthem. It is not "Bermuda Is Another World", even though no more accurate summary of the Island's charms has ever been encapsulated in four words, or 400.

It is instead a tune whose name I do not know, but which starts: "Who — who, who, who — who let the frogs out?"