In the News:

University Challenge host Bamber Gasgoine passed away. One of his many catchphrases back in the day was "starter for 10" which coincidentally is also what Dianne Abbot asks for when she visits a restaurant

Fashion news after Primark announced a bizarre pair-up with bakery chain Greggs, apparently they're going be be launching a limited edition range of clothes. Although in some ways that makes sense, the last time I ate pastry from there half of it ended up down by front anyway.

There's also the story about how the Queen may or may not be suffering from Covid, having caught it from Prince Charles, although that's hardly a surprise given that he spends his days living with an old bat.

For me the more interesting story was the one about smart meters and the ongoing slide into fuel poverty and economic destruction that will come about as part of the "net zero" addenda. For years this has been a largely benign benign movement where wind-farms would appear, your electricity bill would bump up £5/month and then of course there was the whole decision to pay the Chinese to dump plastic waste into the sea rather than bury it in the UK. And all the while the BBC has been very keen to promote Gretta Thunberg who sees herself as a modern Viking in so much as she's from Scandinavia and spends her time sailing about on a boat making people's lives miserable. For the most part this has also been tolerated because some British businesses have made billions out of it, being paid to close down small inefficient factories in the West, and then afterwards being paid a 2nd time by foreign governments to then open up far larger ones in the far East. That's not green or net zero, it's like me deciding to give up beer and wine but then drinking my way through cases of Malibu every week.

However, several years ago laws were passed to outlaw petrol cars and gas boilers and that deadline is only a decade or so away. The cars you buy in 2030 are being designed today, these plans are almost at the point of no return, although by the time you visit a car dealership or find out that it's illegal to repair your boiler, it will be too late to vote the politicians out because they'll all be long-since retired, with the exception of those promoted to the House of Lords where the public don’t et a chance to vote them out. The house of lords is ironically one of the few "houses" that will likely retain gas and oil, largely because I doubt they'll agree to a modernisation + renovation plan by the time the new rules come in. By the time they agree to a timeline to fix the crumbling palace of Westminster, Prince Andrew will be out of jail and Hilary Clinton will have given up running for office.

In the mean time though, an announcement was recently made that electricity companies would have the go-ahead to charge peak pricing for electricity, essentially opening the door to the concept of electricity rationing, and the coercion of the masses to an low-energy agenda that was coerced on them by pictures of polar bears and lies from those who get their bill paid for by the taxpayer anyway. Similarly, there's a suggestion that electric car batteries will be able to be flipped to feed the grid in emergencies, which will very quickly turn into “every evening around 7 o'clock” - shortening the lifespan of car batteries that cost about £20k to replace once they've been charged and discharged enough times. Of course those batteries are actually "free" if you're able to "charge" them back to the tax-payer (geddit?) although I've got a funny feeling that cabinet ministers will be using gas-guzzling Jaguars and Range Rovers long into the next decade on the spurious grounds of security concerns or possibly because Ian Blackford wants to drive a car that's powered by Scottish oil rather than an English power station.

The one ray of sunlight I see is that I recently spoke to a friend in Sussex, who lives in the country, and says that the smart meter they installed in his house does nothing other than provide a number because the smart things it can do like real-time reporting and price adjustments rely on a mobile phone signal, of which there is none where he lives. Perhaps they should have installed his electricity meter at the end the garden up a ladder with an arm in the air. I do fine it hilarious that multiple governments have spent fortunes pushing to gain control over the minutia of people lives and shut off their boiler or kettles from hundreds of miles away, and yet it may all eventually be undermined by those same governments' incompetence and, frankly lack of interest, in offering a decent phone signal if you’re the sort of nasty person that lives in the countryside and probably voted for Brexit.