WHY are so many aspects of our daily life designed to be deliberately annoying?
Energy, for example. Way back in the simpler past you paid your local gas and electricity suppliers. No choice. No worry. Now the way we acquire our energy supplies is down to us. We’re told we can choose where they come from. Oh no we can’t. Your gas and electricity is exactly the same as the chap next door’s, and identical to that posh place up the road. There’s no way you can be selectively fed from a renewable source. What comes down the wires is always a mix.
Your choice lies only in who you pay and what rates they’re charging. There’s the worry. Are you with the right supplier? Should you change? Is the fixed rate better overall? Am I paying too much? If you want to compare tariffs in detail there’s an arithmetical nightmare of different daily and kilowatt/hour rates for gas and electricity. The ‘energy price cap’ means that the price per unit is fixed, currently for the period January to March. This comes to £1,758 for the average household using the average amount of energy. Use more and you’ll pay more.
Broadband’s the same but without a cap. You choose a supplier who gives you a router. But which company should you be with? Are you paying too much? Getting worse performance? How often should you compare costs? Again, nothing but worry. Irritating worry.
Banks are disappearing from our High Streets. Long ago their CEOs decided they could manage their organisation much better if they did away with all those annoying face-to-face episodes with complaining customers. So they shut the local branches and gave us one phone number for everything, which is answered by a robot. That robot offers options 1-9, none of which is to do with your problem.
Robots must be designing cars these days. Robots so clever that they look down on us humans as a very simple form of life. So simple that we need to be protected from all the dangers on our crowded roads. Once upon a time your dashboard had a couple of dials, a pull-out knob marked ‘Choke’ and switches for lights, indicators and wipers. Nothing to distract you from the road ahead.
My car is ten years old and was obviously designed even then to replace, as far as possible, a driver’s own ideas about how to control the precious vehicle, and to use, as much as possible, the full potential of the latest computer chips. Therefore it has 15 buttons on the steering wheel, plus 21 knobs and switches covering wipers, lights and windows, 11 buttons on the dashboard and three more round the gear lever. You could also be faced with any one of 70 symbols telling you something’s wrong and furious bleeps if you drive within half a yard of a twig. Everything to distract you from the road ahead.
Heat pumps are another notorious backward move in the home heating story. Central heating was a mistake and to follow that with another disastrous idea is unbelievable. When we sat around in caves we had a fire. A real fire. You could come back from a cold and useless mammoth hunt knowing you could stand by the fire and be warmed up within minutes.
Coming in from our recent cold spell and pressing yourself up against a radiator is not the same thing. Not anything like the same thing. Worse: we are told that a heat pump system should really be used for underfloor heating. Imagine taking the dog for a walk in minus five then coming in to nothing more than a warm floor. We humans need one place in our houses we can go to get warm, quickly. We used to have coal fires.
There are more irritations, of course. The way our leaders think we will one day have a constant and plentiful supply of electricity just from wind and sun. The way the wise ones who are looking after us send dramatic warnings to the lower-level mortals every time the temperature goes below zero, or the wind blows harder than usual.
Then there’s the A&E problem. Why is it very rarely mentioned that if GP surgery appointments are not easily available, people will go to A&E? In fact, they’re beginning to call it the ‘Emergency Department’ to get the message home, which will work only if appropriate surgery appointments are easily available. No signs of that, alas.
I blame newspapers for the appalling lack of geographical knowledge. This is apparent from the TV quiz shows, where you discover that nobody knows the whereabouts of Turkey, Iran, Colombia or pretty well any country you care to name. Newspapers? Yes, when you browse the legacy sort with real paper pages, you can’t help picking up all kinds of ancillary knowledge, for instance from the maps that go with the current news item. But a newspaper on your phone? Useless. You scan the headlines and miss all the interesting stuff.
But what we’re all really irritated by is our baffling, capricious, impulsive, bewildered and disastrously inefficient government, otherwise known as the Karadews.
Meet the Karadews, the Great British Concert Party:
Keir, Angela, Rachel, Andy, David, Ed, Wes and Shabana
We’ll give you our news,
We’ll make your life better!
New programme every Monday
See politics skewered, skits on PMQs
Vote for who’s to be the next Chief Clown
Watch and wonder at our unbelievable tricks
Be astonished by our Palace of Many Varieties
Laugh at our crazy struggles to give you a good time
Cheer when we tell you how wonderful next year will be
Weep as you listen to heart-rending songs of the past
You might never see anything like this ever again
A performance you’ll talk about for years
We’re the Great British Concert Party
We are the brilliant Karadews
We’ll give you our news
To make your life better!
Book now to avoid disappointment.
Free seats at the front and half-price ice cream for refugees, anyone on benefits, all Concert Party employees and some OAPs.
Big reduction in seat prices by 2030.
Note: At great expense we’ve installed the very latest zero-emission heating system, so please be sure to wear suitable clothing.
