Gotcha! You could almost taste the fusty air of jubilation in Fingleton's office as he briefed me on the findings of his yoghurt commission. Bang to rights! All four of the buggers and half the bloody dairy industry too! Eat my shorts, Freeman! Yes, heartless exploiters of the impoverished, I can tell you that Irish eyes were smiling that day. And he had a point. I mean, £270m in pure extortion! That's 5p on the average weekly shopping bill of every man, woman and Daily Mail reader in Britain over the two years that this wickedness took place! Or a day's subscription to Sky! As it happens, I remember it well. With Fingleton prancing gleefully around the crossed shillelaghs on the floor of his office, I cast my mind back to the heyday of Pumsey's Price Palace and the very darkly worded message I got from London to the effect that I'd better whack up my milk price or find myself sharing a head office with some rather large offcuts from the Chevaline butchers. No, it wasn't from the British Retail Consortium but from Michael Meacher, head of Defra at the time. Seems the NFU had applied the blowlamp to his baubles and told him the very future of the British crème fraîche industry was at stake unless they copped some more dosh. Truth is, we were all raking it in on the semi-skimmed at the time and I don't know whether Messrs Giles of Ham ended up any better off. I certainly remember seeing one milk processor at the Porsche showroom on Park Lane afterwards, although I assumed he was just picking up remoulds for his tractor. I left Fingleton quoting colourfully from Finnegan's Wake. If this is what the price of Cheestrings can do to a man, I'm steering clear of Freeman next month. Bliss.

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