Power to the People

I have yet another class this evening, and so I am frantically trying to get this written before it starts, in order that once it is all over, we can go directly to bed, without even passing Go or collecting two hundred pounds.

You might have noticed that Going Back To Bed has become something of a theme to my diary entries lately.

This is because we have been following the Little And Often method of sleeping, and I don’t mind telling you that it doesn’t work very well.

On the plus side, I have hardly needed to read Nick Clegg’s book at all. I have been practically asleep whilst still removing my dressing gown.

We have the Right Dressing Gowns again, incidentally, which is a huge relief. It is troubling to be inappropriately clad at such a fragile moment as bedtime.

We worked again last night, because we are trying to save up for Asda again, and this morning was a dark and gloomy occasion in consequence, and I have been a bit fuzzy and absent-minded all day. I had a list of things that I was supposed to be doing, but I could not find it.

Once Mark had gone to work I did some paper working things. The council had sent me a form to be filled in about the new taxi meter calibration, so I completed it and helpfully corrected their use of apostrophes and added some explanatory comments before I sent it back.

After that I read the electricity and gas meters, in the hope that we might not need to give the Electricity Board quite so much money this month, but it was a forlorn moment of optimism, and if I had collected two hundred pounds when I passed Go, I would be handing it straight over to the Electricity Board.

I do not know what we do that uses so much electricity. I read in the august Daily Telegraph that if I turned the computer off at night then I would save myself £16 every year, but that still leaves £198.64 to be accounted for every month. In any case it takes so long for the computer to warm itself up when it has been switched off that I would not be able to use it before lunchtime, and Mark says that it is not good for computers to be turned off very often.

I suppose I could consider cutting down on hoovering.

We do not even have the divorce solar panel working yet. It is on the wall, which means that it is no longer massive and inconvenient in the yard so we do not need to get a divorce over it, but there are no glass bits stuck to it yet. Those are still in the shed. I do not care about the shed because I do not go in it, and so we do not need to get a divorce even over those. .

Mark says that once he has ordered the fittings that he needs he will be able to start installing it properly some day when he has a day off, but the last one of those was about six weeks ago, and I do not see any more looming hopefully in our immediate future.

This means that I am still filling the washing machine with the kettle from the top of the stove.

This was brilliant when the stove was lit, but it is out now, because of the springtime. To my surprise it is still cheaper to heat the water in the kettle, even on the top of the gas cooker. I do wish we could make friends with President Putin again. I do not at all like the idea of not having gas and being obliged to cook by electricity.

Mark has built his windmill in the shed but he can’t put it up until he has moved the water tank out of the yard. He can’t do this until he starts on the divorce solar panel.

He will get around to it in the end. We will have our very own power sources in the back yard, replacing the pile of scrap iron that is there at the moment.

All our troubles will be over.