The prices of audio-visual equipment are almost 14 per cent lower than a year ago. In fact, they are half the price they were at the start of 2002.Diane Coyle, the managing director of Enlightenment Economics, a consultancy, said: "The pattern of price increases and decreases has favoured people who buy goods rather than services, so although that includes kids' shoes and clothes, the big gainers are young people living at home and buying iPods and computers." The losers in this equation will be those who have to pay for services - utilities and local council functions - but who are not interested or unable even to afford the cut-price goods.One particularly vulnerable group is pensioners, who suffer a double blow of having to meet these spiralling bills while their pensions and benefit payments rise in line with headline inflation. The charity Age Concern says that inflation-busting bills have left pensioners living "just above the breadline". A survey it commissioned found that more than one-third said they could no longer afford to spend a day out with friends or go out for a meal.EnergyWatch, the gas and electricity watchdog, said since 2003 gas prices had risen by 66 per cent and electricity by 45 per cent. While households spend 3.3 per cent of their outlay on fuel and light, the figure for a single household pensioner is 12 per cent. "We are deeply worried about the impact these prices rises are having on those on low incomes and those we would regard as extremely vulnerable," said Allan Asher, the chief executive. "The answer is to try to mitigate these increases among the fuel poor and there's only one solution - their incomes have to go up."A Treasury spokesperson said: "The Government is spending £11bn more every year in real terms on pensioners overall and as a result 2.1 million pensioners have been lifted out of low income poverty since 1996-7."Average pensioner households are £29 per week better off, and the poorest third £40 a week better off, in real terms, than under the 1997 system of tax and benefits.".
High in the craggy, snow-capped mountains of the South Tyrol, a bearded man with streaks of grey running through a shock of wild hair is growing exasperated. He wants us to get off the grass - which seems strange coming from someone who has spent most of his life clambering up the sheer faces of the world's toughest mountains. Walking at a ferocious clip, he leads the way through the narrow corridors and winding paths of his 10th-century castle. He bounds up ladders perched perilously on the cool stone floors and negotiates dizzying spiral staircases with light agility, and rarely pauses to look back. He waits stoically for his more earthbound guests to catch up before beginning to speak. The intense blue eyes of the world's most famous mountaineer gleam with excitement and penetrate the medieval gloom. "Great things are done when men and mountains meet," he says in deep, earnest tones, gesturing grandly at the scene around him "That is what William Blake once wrote It is true Great things do happen."He, of all people, should know. For this man, whose straight back, broad shoulders and golden, weathered skin still exude strength and health rarely seen in people far younger than him, is Reinhold Messner, whose astonishing feats on Everest and on peaks throughout the world have earned him the status of the greatest climber in history.In 1980, Messner became the first person to scale Everest alone without supplementary oxygen.
He recently became the first to conquer all 14 of the Earth's summits over 8,000m. He has journeyed across the hostile wastes of the Antarctic, Greenland and the Tibetan plateau, not to mention the Gobi and Takla Makan deserts, which he crossed on foot.He spent years in the glare of the world's media spotlight over the controversial death of his brother on the slopes of Everest, for which he was held responsible by his fellow climbers, but from which he claimed vindication last year. He even led a one-man hunt for the only other creature of the hills as infamous - and, as cartoonists delight in pointing out, as untameably hairy - as he: the yeti.And yet, in recent years, Messner has been directing his seemingly limitless energies to a rather different project, far closer to home. He has taken his pioneering spirit to the peaks of his native South Tyrol and become, as he calls it, "an inventor of museums".Over the past decade he has been working to create a network of "mountain museums", five different sites connected by their focus on the relationship between man and mountain, and by their majestic locations.