OVER recent days I've been hard at it down in the secret Byron Shire News design dungeon working on a bespoke shark barrier made out of antique woodwind instruments to be deployed across Wategos Beach.

It's all about cost-cutting, fitting in with the future and fiscal rectitude (not what you think but equally painful).

So this week, as that well respected Keynsian Snoop Dogg espoused, "I got my mind on my money, my money on my mind.”

With that on my mind it dawned on me that it's becoming very expensive indeed to live like a peasant.

We're being encouraged to live more sustainably and ethically as in days of yore. But the cost of the average paddock-to-plate lifestyle, as seen on Facebook and Instagram, can only be afforded by the rich.

And even though today's well off tend to dress like faux peasants in crochet, cheesecloth and chunky jewellery, you know at the end of their rustic meal, served on slabs of artisan aged hard wood, they ascend into golden helicopters for the commute back to their castles.

The rest of us are left to live like actual peasants struggling to pay for our 21st century food and lodgings on our 18th century wages.

And the cost of the average family tumbrel and thatched hovel are enough to see you and yours manacled together in the workhouse for the terms of your natural lives.

Some poor wretches can't even afford a thatched hovel and have to sleep in their tumbrels or bustle in your hedgerow when night falls.

It's often hard to work out which absentee overlord owns the particular yoke under which we struggle at any one time.

Is it Lord Michael of Macquarie Street enthralled by the high priests of economic rationalism and the highwaymen of highway construction?

Just last week he decreed the sale of some of our apothecaries to the highest bidder.

Or is it Prince Malcolm the Pretender. In his heart of hearts he wants to help but is ensnared, as was Lear, by his medievally ugly daughters Joyce, Bernardi and Christenson.

Alas dear reader, the culprits may be closer to hand than we first imagine.

Not so very long ago the good men and women of the High Council of the Shire of Byron relaxed the rules pertaining to secondary hovels and mangers.

It was, they thought, a cunning plan to alleviate the desperate want for affordable dwellings across our fair shire.

But instead of offering homes to honest local peasants (and the fruit of their loins) or the infirm and the aged indoors, the local land barons offered up their secondary hovels and mangers for rent on Ye Olde Air BnB.

Which leaves the local peasantry skulking in the gardening aisle of Bunnings, eyeing off the pitch forks.