Week 149

Monday 24 January 2022

• Some progress with the electricity situation: they’ve amended a meter reading. But I think I’m being charged the normal rate for my off-peak usage, and the off-peak rate for the other usage, which would mean my sometimes parsimonious carefulness about when I use certain appliances has all been for nothing. I tried to say this on the phone, but they insisted the readings were “all in line” now, which, well, they would be if they’re all consistently wrong.

  But I’ll wait for the next proper bill, and maybe it’ll be all right and they’re more competent than they appear. And maybe it’s a crumb of comfort to imagine that, given the high wholesale price, they’re probably still losing money even if they’re possibly overcharging me.

  A plummy-voiced robot did a follow-up call to asking me to rate my experience, and of course I gave their staff full marks for friendliness – actually, they weren’t that friendly, and it would have been unsettling if they had been – but no I wouldn’t recommend them to a friend.

• The adverts on twitter dot com: mostly crypto-bollocks, interspersed with weird mining company lobbyism.

  Actually, around the season of Advent, there were some good ones promoting imported curios like this Cute Stealing Coins Cents Penny Cat Money Box Saving Money Collecting Money Piggy Bank for Kids Kids (Cute Yellow Cat), which I just think is neat – pointless, yes, but also art. And elasticated covers for making a horrible sofa look pretty, which ought to be right up my street. But I haven’t bought either.

  The adverts on bus times dot org: the London International Mime Festival. Which I’m delighted by.

  The weird, Teutonic fraud has started again, but there’s no suggestion that it’s anything to worry about. If I wanted to know exactly, fine-grainedly, how much money the website was making day by day, I’d be annoyed because the “noise” of all the robots’ clicking makes that hard to know, but don’t so I’m not. (Unnerving to see in those old weeknotes that I was banging on about water meters, how boring.)

• Spent some time on a bicycle in the low sun, and may have taken a photograph of a bus or two – it’s a cruel irony that the time when the roads are most muddy and gritty, i.e. now, is the same time that bus washes are most likely to freeze over. And squelched around a marsh, which brought some small joy, but here’s a tip for me for next time: wear some wellington boots.

• A year ago, I heard Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi talking about Vladimir Putin, and I often think about the way they said “Pootun” with like a Norfolk accent.