Every country has its charming games and customs, and this week in Britain we invented a whole new one.
On Thursday all of us spent the day desperately reading gas and electric meters, photographing them from seven angles and spent two hours trying to send the numbers to a crashed website, while we screamed and family members muttered “take six deep breaths and try again” because the next day the price was going up by two million per cent.
Thanks to this sense of fun from companies such as EDF and E.On, from now on we can play this jolly game every year.
It can become like searching for Easter eggs, and we’ll all laugh about the time Grandma didn’t quite get her reading in on time, bless her, so she spent the next month living in the sideboard clutching guinea pigs inside her nightie to keep warm.
In a few years, it will be a festival, like Halloween. Each March 31 one person will dress up as the EDF man and children will scream “aaaaagh don’t take our heating away”.
People will run from house to house looking into cupboards with a torch, then we’ll all eat raw pizzas that we cannot afford to cook to celebrate Meter-reading Day.
This has happened because if we don’t have an exact reading from the moment the price goes up, the energy companies can charge us for everything at a higher rate.
They’ve been given a licence to do whatever they fancy. Next week it will be announced: “Due to rocketing fuel prices, energy companies can marry one person from every household” and it will be considered a great honour to hand your sister over to Scottish Power.
The Government gives advice on how to “shop around” for cheaper tariffs, as it’s our responsibility to see which of the big six suppliers are slightly less impossibly expensive than the others.
It’s like the police saying: “There have been a lot of robberies in this area lately, so we’ve decided to crack down. We’ve set up an app, so you can contact all the muggers in the area and arrange which one you would like to hold you at knifepoint and run off with your bank card.”
Because it’s all down to you. This is why you’ll find Government websites that give advice such as: “Save money on boiling water by filling a pan, and taking it to your local crematorium to pop it on the furnace during a funeral, so you enjoy a well-earned brew.”
The only people who aren’t told by the Government how to reduce energy costs are the energy companies who set the costs.
I suppose there’s no point in ordering them about as they’re completely helpless.
Since 2010 they’ve paid £200billion to their shareholders, but there’s nothing they can do to stop that.
Their prices and profits just keep shooting up until eventually they’ll own the universe, and creatures from other galaxies will wonder why they have a bill for £580 from British Gas.
So all we can do is huddle around a candle with a raw fish finger to celebrate.
