Poetry Weak

Monday's shirt is white with formality
Tuesday's shirt shows a bit of personality
Wednesday's shirt is colourful and gay
Thursday's shirt shows it's washing day
Friday's shirt is probably a t-shirt with the implicit slogan "As compensation for the fact that I'm measurably less well off than I would have been thirty years ago, I'm willing to accept the ability to dress according to a slightly modified dress code one day in the week. For some inexplicable reason, I see this as an indicator of the high esteem in which my employer holds me, as if it somehow makes us friends."

Power

So after blaming poorly designed technology for my lack of posts, I am now going to shift the blame to my feeble body. One may well wonder how a broken foot prevents the writing of a blog, indeed throughout history some of our greatest writers have used a period of convalescence to create some of their greatest work. Unfortunately, I'm not up to such feats, and I bet history's greatest writers weren't expected to log on and work from home. Deprived of my commute, I lost all blogging impetus. That's not to say I didn't travel at all during the time that I was only able to use crutches, indeed my time as a mobility restricted user of London's public transport systems has largely restored my faith in humanity. People are generally considerate of a person on crutches, in that they will make room for them and (usually if they're female) give up their seat for them. The fact that the making way was often closer to giving me a wide birth was also interesting: it seems a disability, even a temporary one nudges one into another stratum of society; I became an honorary member of the pavement underclass. This position was acknowledged on both sides: just as many 'normal' people were willing to give me a wide berth, so many of society's outcasts (the homeless, the troubled, etc) were willing to embrace me as one of their own, as if a pair of crutches suddenly rendered me visible to them.
For me, this only serves to underline how much like everyone else in society the invisible underclass are, in that they are only willing to engage with that which is familiar to them, and then only when it is right in front of them. Perhaps it is a legacy of the economic crisis that we are all increasingly short sighted, even when we are being selfish.
Whilst I've been 'off', Ed Miliband has been making political capital with his promised energy price freeze. Rightly, he has identified the growing disparity between the rate of increase of prices and the rate of increase in wages as a massive political issue. The Tory idea that an economic recovery will make everything better is laughably naive, when a global recovery will simply drive demand for the world's increasingly finite resources and increase the cost of living even further. Their plan B is even more dumb: create a brand new housing bubble so that homeowners (a shrinking constituency, but crucially one that votes) feel wealthier for long enough to vote them back into power. This is classic shortsighted democracy in action: not merely delaying a problem, but exacerbating it in the process. Unfortunately Labour's energy policy is likely to do the same, although as they are not in power, it is the reaction of the government and the energy lobbyists that will actually do the damage. The idea that ditching green levies is going to benefit anyone is so mindbendingly shortsighted as to be almost unbelievable. How do the energy companies believe they will make a profit once they have burned all of the fossil fuels? Green levies are perhaps mis-named, maybe we should call them future energy security levies. After all, for our energy supply we are increasingly at the mercy of malevolent kleptocracies such as Russia. Energy companies and apparently the government are not concerned with long term energy security or indeed energy sovereignty, both appear happy to let the China and France take the big financial stakes in our future generating capacity, whilst letting the rest rely on Russian gas. Long term energy planning for the current government appears to mean wringing the last of our national fuel reserves out of the earth by fracturing the ground beneath our feet. And when that's gone, then what? What will we do when we've sucked the landscape dry and failed to build an alternative energy infrastructure? What do the government care, they won't be in power then, their housing bubble will have burst long ago and they'll have retired to their country piles powered by the rooftop generators they managed to get planning permission for after the Chinese bought out the NIMBYs next door. Because after all politicians are only like the rest of us: they only really deal with the issues immediately in front of them.
As I've pointed out before, this blog is as much about me getting it right as preaching to others, that's why I've changed my electricity supplier to Ecotricity, even though their prices are slightly higher than my current provider. You see I've decided to 'go long' as the traders say, on renewable electricity: I'm gambling on the fact that subsidising the construction of renewable energy infrastructure is going to do more to keep my energy costs down in the long term than subsidising the French taxpayer.
I'm sure those who read texts and like to find in them something altogether anterior to what is there will say that I have switched energy provider because I am a smug lefty tree-hugger who just wants to flaunt his green credentials to his urban lefty mates. If the side effect is that I get a bit of righteous-cred amongst the urban greenerati, then so much the better, but let's not sugar coat this, I'm doing it because I'm just as selfish as the rest of you. I want my energy prices to stay low, not just next year, not just for 20 months, but for the next 50 years.