There's a rather magnificently prejudiced Punch cartoon from the end of the last century that features a Scotsman with a grievance (as P.G. Wodehouse pointed out - a character rarely confused with a ray of sunshine). The caricature of my fellow countryman is raging at the Babylonian luxury and expense of London living, commenting: “I was only there for a week, and bang went saxpence!”

Some of us might wish that this tradition of parsimony among Scots who find themselves in London had proved rather more persistent, but it wasn't Treasury extravagance that was on my mind when I felt an atavistic rage at lavish expenditure last week. It was the outrage that is Scotrail's buffet service.

Asking for a cup of coffee, I was handed a cup of hot water, a small tube of instant coffee and some milkstix (see Matthew Parris columns passim). All for £1.60. I was only there for a beverage and bang went 32 shillings.

Of course the prices on the buffet service on railways has always been wildly inflated. In that respect trains are like the European Union - as soon as you get on board the food becomes much more expensive. But what offended me most was the nakedly contemptuous way in which I was being short-changed. I wasn't even left with the illusion that the murky brown liquid for which I was paying over the odds had somehow been percolated or freshly filtered. No, it was just a cup of water that might have come out of the hot tap and a plastic sachet of Maxwell House. It was the sort of catering I thought I had left behind when I stopped entertaining at university.

My natural tendency to grumble pompously was counteracted by the stillness of soul the scenery inspired. Which was just as well, given what followed.

After getting off the train at a remote Highland spot, I reflexively reached for my mobile phone to make a call that travel had rendered impossible. When I discovered that I had lost it.

Then I noticed the (miraculously unvandalised) phone on the station platform - with a little card informing me that should I need the assistance of Scotrail I need merely dial star-star-one. I picked up the receiver expecting nothing more than a jarring, disembodied, electronic voice and a request to press “5” for train times and “7” for credit card bookings. A gentle lilt greeted me and offered to help. When I explained my circumstances the man at the other end sympathised, took the number of the place I was staying, took my wife's number and promised to speak to the driver and staff to see if they could search the train for me. He was as good as his word.

In the end the phone was retrieved by a thoughtful driver, who'd seen me drop it after I got off the train. Scotrail rang me where I was staying to ask after me, explain the measures they'd taken and wish me a trouble-free journey later. What do you have to pay to get service like this I thought?

And then I realised - you have to pay £1.60 for coffee-scented hot water to get service like that.

Price to pay

Because, if we look at every transaction in its own economic right, robbed of context, social value and history then we're at risk of feeling continually aggrieved and ripped off. Or if we get the price we want, we risk driving a valuable service into the ground. Instead of seeing life through the prism of our own profit-and-loss account, shouldn't we instead judge organisations in the round - acknowledging their defects may well be inseparable from their virtues?

The lady holding you up by travelling at 20mph down the country road is the woman who runs the shop that keeps alive the chocolate-box village you're escaping to, the independently owned bookshops that eschew three- for-two style discounting are the ones with a diverse stock that makes every visit a journey in serendipity, and the publishers who market celeb titles so aggressively are cross-subsidising literary innovation. Jordan's Ponies is the price we pay for Roberto Bolaño.

Taste test

Mind you, the rate at which Bolaño's blockbuster 2666 is flying off the shelves suggests it may soon be subsidising the stock it really is impossible to shift - Dick Cheney's anthology of favourite light verse, Chris Moyles's Yoga for Life manual, Jonathan Ross's memoirs.

But, at 898 pages, Bolaño's novel may appear too forbidding for many. In which case I have a suggestion. Acquire a copy of his rather ominously titled Nazi Literature in the Americas - just over a 100 pages long and divided into easily digestible chunks.

NLitA purports to be a collection of biographical studies highlighting the achievements (or lack of them) of the most notable fascist writers from North and South America. A tour through the ideological, personal and artistic wreckage of extreme right-wing Peruvian fantasists might not appear to promise much light relief at a time like this, but NLitA is one of the most darkly funny reads I've ever come across. An extended satire on both literary and political pretension, and in particular the folly of paying over much attention to the political views of artists, its a pocket Dunciad for our times.

Love it and you will, like me, be anxious for more Bolaño. Hate it, and you will have spared yourself at least 798 pages worth of misplaced reading time wondering if you're missing the point of the book of the hour.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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