2011 — 21 March: Monday

There's a certain, hollow, amusement1 at the suggestion this morning, by a spokesperson from Ofgen (one of the supine regulatory bodies), that power companies have (by, for example, increasing the number of customer tariffs2 to upward of 300) been (shall we say?) misleading their customers up many a garden path. The amusement comes from the proposed solution: a return to single, national, tariffs.

I never bought into Thatcher's fiction that one set of pipes, cables, roads, tracks, what-have-you can realistically be used to supply competitively priced products such as gas, electricity, water, buses, trains when these "products" are surprisingly difficult to differentiate.

"Captains of industry"? Don't make me laugh.

One who knows...

... my interest in typography pointed me to this.

Many a slip...

The would-be purchaser of dear Mama's house wants to reduce the price to fund repairs to its central heating system pipework. Seems reasonable to me, but I wonder what Big Bro will say. Meanwhile, methinks it's time (11:50) for my next cuppa and some "lemonses". The sky is blue, the sun is shining. Perhaps it's Spring? [Pause] In fact, it's so nice that — throwing caution to the winds — my walking partner in crime and I have decided to down a quick lunch each and rendezvous for some further fresh air...

Back, 6.3 miles later, in time to field a request for some gas fitter certification documentation. The nearest I can get to that is the current British Gas Home Care agreement, which I've scanned and emailed off to the frozen North. Time (16:50) for my next cuppa. Past time, in fact. I'm parched.

Care to hazard...

... a guess? Mike's chum Peter, in Spain, has a theory but it's a tree name I don't know. The image here...

More Buds

... is about life size.

  

Footnotes

1  Given my instinctive antipathy towards privatisation of nation-wide infrastructures, such as gas, water, electricity, public transport.
2  The frightfully nice chaps who called round from my previous electricity supplier, for example, not only had a 16-page small-print booklet of their prices, but were themselves unable to find anywhere within it the means to match prices with my new supplier. Given their repeated verbal claims to be competitive on price I don't think I was odd in concluding they were out to bamboozle me.