24 April (Part 1) - The cost of living. (The elephant in the room)
The rising cost of living that too many politicians are ignoring will come
back to bite them hard. Why did Bexley’s Council Tax go up 2% more than either
Barnet or Bromley’s? Why did Khan’s precept go up 10% more than when Boris was
Mayor? (He reduced it.)
Then there is basic shopping needs. I try to avoid shopping. Most of my food is imported from Orpington
because Tesco’s selection of Gluten Free stuff is so much better than Abbey Wood
Sainsbury’s. Almost anywhere is better than Abbey Wood Sainsbury’s except that I
can walk there in under ten minutes.
Even so I try to avoid it apart from picking up a few basics every ten days or
so. I did exactly that yesterday and found both travelators working but once on
the first floor normal service resumed. No baskets and no signs to say where
things were to be found. How long is it since they did the rearrangement? Two
months, three months? Not that the sign removal was a great loss, they dated
from when the store opened nearly seven years ago and were hopelessly out of date. The management there must be useless, in fact I know
it is. When I asked the manager why there had been no Kellogg’s Cornflakes on visits three weeks apart he
said “supply issues”. I think I knew that.
I didn’t buy much but every single item on my mundane list, except the milk, had gone up by exactly
20% in the past ten days or so. The milk had gone up by 10% a couple of months ago.
How does Sunak and his ilk think that the average man on the Sainsbury’s travelator can afford that on top of the highest tax rates in 70 years?
I bought three identical Ready Meals but the check out refused to accept one
of them. It said I had put the wrong item on the shelf. I collected my things and
moved to another check out. Same thing. I asked the man in the Sainsbury’s suit for help.
He shrugged and walked away. I went to Customer Services where all three scanned OK. On the way
home I remembered that the Customer Services check out has no scales so I put them
all on mine. One item was seriously underweight.
The Ready Meals may no longer be cheap but they can be microwaved for a few
pennies. Cooking a proper meal in the oven can cost the best part of a quid.
Today it is exactly two months since my Smart Meter was installed. The charges
it showed were largely nonsense, at first wildly inaccurate and after a
complaint less so. The charge for electricity was consistently higher than ‘usage times
tariff’ and I proved the gas readings were wrong by turning it off at the main
valve for ten days and watching the pennies add up some days and remain at zero
(no Standing Charge) on others. (Not something you can do if not living alone!)
The energy company said this was perfectly normal, a Smart Meter Display was
only a guide or as I labelled it, useless. They then did a runner and the only
way to attract their attention is via Twitter. That is so wrong, but it worked -
up to a point. For gas only the display has corrected itself retrospectively and the ten days of not using
the gas all now correctly show the Standing Order instead of some random number.
I watched the display unit clock up two kilowatt hours of electricity and it
said the charge would be £1.04 without the standing charge which is nearly twice
what it would be if the tariff was correctly applied. Back to Twitter.
Why does each unit have to be fine tuned? You would think they would all be
running the same software.
I have managed to get my costs down to about £1·50 or so a day, nearer to £2 if
the telly goes on in the evening. Serves me right for running the separate audio
amplifier too loud. If I threw bleach into the garden pond I could save at least
40 pence a day. That damned pump!