Banking experts made the startling prediction that in 2040 a pint of beer would cost £11.50.

They arrived at this sum by using Office of National Statistic figures for percentage price rises from 1914 to 2014. And, wait for it, by the year 2065, they said a pint would cost £47.63.

”Eh up, I’ll get them in. Three pints of bitter, two pints of Stella and a rum and blackcurrant, please love. And one for yourself.”

“Ta very much. That’ll be £294 for the round and I’ll just have half a lager. That’s another thirty quid.”

It sounds implausible except I can recall, standing at the bar of the Albert Hotel next door to the old Examiner office in Huddersfield in about 1976, contemplating the price of ale. Like you do.

Someone had just bought a cigar for 50p and it was suggested it wouldn’t be long before the price of a pint – then about 32p – reached that same milestone. Oh, how we laughed.

The cost of living and even the price of beer, is, of course, all relative to wages and inflation.

In 1900 a pint cost 2d, old money. Beer was considerably stronger then.

Ever since, the strength has gone down and the price has gone up.

A pint was 6d in 1920, 9d in 1955, 1s 10d in 1966 and 12.5p in 1971 when decimalisation was introduced.

Drinking habits also changed.

Mild beer was the best selling ale until the 1960s. CAMRA was formed in 1971 to combat keg beers like Red Barrel and Tankard and that same decade lager swept to popularity.

The long hot summer of 1976 probably had a lot to do with that. In 1973 a pint of lager was 14p. Forty years later, in 2013, it was £2.87 – a price rise of 1,948%.

So a pint costing almost £50 in another 50 years time no longer seems at all daft.

Mind you, finding somewhere to drink it might be more problematic.

In 1900 there were 102,000 pubs in England and Wales. In 1980 there were 69,000 in the whole of the UK and 48,000 last year.

The British Pub Association say 29 a week are closing.

It could be the only pubs left in 50 years time will be in museums.

Were there two pubs called The Dog Inn back in 19th century Huddersfield?

Were there two pubs called The Dog Inn back in 19th century Huddersfield?

David Senior, of Kirkheaton, said his great great grandfather, a chap called Percival, was landlord of The Dog in Old Street in the 1860s and last week asked if anyone could identify the pub.

A website that listed old pubs had two Dog Inns – one in Old Street and the other in Kirkgate.

But reader Kenneth Greenwood, of Berry Brow, has questioned the location of Old Street. He knew it as South Street. Had David Senior got it wrong?

I checked again on Google Maps and found the same street listed as both Old Street and Old South Street.

Kenneth says: “I wonder if your correspondent has got the name Old Street mixed up with Oldgate which ran parallel to Southgate, behind the tenements. At the end of it now stands Oldgate House before it joins Kirkgate. At the other end was access to King street and there was a pub called The Clothiers Arms.”

Armed with this new information I searched again and discovered that The Dog Inn was located off Dog Yard in Kirkgate, on the site of what is now Oldgate House. It closed in 1910. So at least we know its true location.

Kenneth adds: “My grandfather, who was born in 1867 and lived as a boy on Northgate, used to say that in his youth there were 13 pubs between Shorehead and the bottom of Kirkgate. Since the beer was apparently stronger then, people were known to make bets on whether you could drink half a pint (then called a gill) in each one and be sober at the end – or at least able to stand.

“Many of those pubs would have been on Oldgate.”

And one of them would have been The Dog Inn.