Easy Being Green?

My fixed price gas and energy deal ran out at the end of last month. I managed to get quite lucky with this as the fixed price was lower than the cheapest new deals for almost all of the contract period which is quite fortunate as the contract had a £50 early termination fee. However, having looked at the supplier's new tariffs it would have cost me a hefty £500 per annum to renew with their latest fixed rate so I said a quick Auf Wiedersehen to them and headed off to the comparison sites.

Often the fixed rate deals are amongst the cheapest which, on the face of it, doesn’t make that much sense as it is the supplier who is taking most of the risk with price fluctuations. However, it is the early termination fees that really ties people in which rather explains why people will stick with a fixed deal when prices are dropping. The curious thing I found, though, is that when I did the search the best price was for an energy supplier that had no early termination fee, had variable rates and provided all its electricity from renewable sources.

In fact, it wasn’t just the top one but several of the cheapest electricity providers were all-renewable (or should that be “sustainable” so as not to break the second law of thermodynamics?). It could be that this is something of a marketing ploy but it could also be that the cost of “green” energy is actually getting pretty competitive. Certainly, solar panels are no longer a rare sight on domestic homes and I can see four wind turbines from the end of my garden. The transmission costs alone of this electricity are presumably far cheaper than the nearest coal fired power station which I believe is somewhere in Yorkshire.

So, as it was, I went with the cheap variable rate firm which is a somewhat hippy-dippy outfit called bulb.co.uk and even managed to get another £50 off my bill by clicking on a refer-a-friend link (I’ve never met the guy but he is presumably £50 better off as well now). This sort of viral marketing seems to be quite common but I’ll not look a gift horse in the mouth. If anyone want to give it a go my referral is this https://join.bulb.co.uk/join/quote/rod1556 although I’d strongly suggest checking a comparison site first such as https://www.uswitch.com/.

Anyway, just before I posted this I noticed an email saying that they have reduced my standing charge. Maybe variable rate deals have their advantages after all?

The Eaters of Light

I had a bit of a heads-up about last week’s Doctor Who a fortnight ago which involved a trip to a Thai restaurant. We had gone there for Saturday night dinner and Nina saw a couple that she has known for a number of years. They asked us whether we were going anywhere after the restaurant and we informed them that we had an appointment with the good Doctor. They said that they were watching this series of Doctor Who intently as an old friend of theirs was writing an episode. This rather intrigued me as I tried to place who it could be: presumably a Scottish writer and presumably not Steven Moffat who writes more than the odd episode. I quickly narrowed it down to Rona Munro.

Nina’s friends were rather taken aback that I knew the name. At first they thought I must know her. I don’t know her personally but I certainly do know of her as she wrote the last ever episode of Doctor Who’s original series, Survival, and is a very respected writer both before and since that. I did glean from them that the episode was set in Scotland and involved the fate of the infamous Ninth Legion of the Roman Army. Also I was told that it involved ancient cairns which doubly appealed to me as crawling around Neolithic monuments is something of a passion of mine.

So what did I think of The Eaters of Light? Basically, I loved it. It had very much a feeling of Classic Who in that it was a stand-alone story but incorporated a Sci-Fi concept around a real historical mystery: the disappearance of the Ninth. Similar things have been done a number of times over the years but it has the effect of routing a fantastical story into very solid historical roots. Admittedly, this was obviously filmed in Wales rather than Scotland but to me that didn’t matter as the performances from the cast more than allowed for this suspension of disbelief. I also rather liked the idea that Neolithic monuments were aligned to the Sun to deal with phantom beasties rather than the probable truth which is that they were accurate, if somewhat unwieldy, scientific instruments to determine the seasons.

It’s worth noting that Rona Munro is the only Doctor Who writer to have written for both the old and new series. This also means that she has the longest time between consecutive stories at almost 28 years. Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait as long for her next episode. The two part finale now looks fascinating. We are also past the Summer solstice so our days, as well as those of the twelfth Doctor, are beginning to draw in.

Memories of the Absurd

I think I’ve written about starting to watch Doctor Who as a child before. I was very young (pre-school) but ended up watching it with some older cousins who we were staying with that were mad keen on it. From looking at old holiday photo albums (along with the broadcast dates) the first serial that I would have seen featured the Daleks but the one that really stuck in my mind was one that featured the Ice Warriors along with a thing in a washing machine called Arcturis and a squeaky-voiced green creature, called Alpha Centauri, consisting of a cloak, with a huge bulbous head, featuring one giant eye. I may have been young but the absurdity of this menagerie of weirdness clearly struck a chord – I was hooked.

Last Saturday’s episode, The Empress of Mars, also featured the Ice Warriors now emerging from their extended hibernation by a group of Victorian colonial soldiers.  All rather steam-punk (and not cyber-punk as I erroneously first typed!) and very much in keeping with the inventive weirdness that one would associate with Doctor Who. Like the last Ice Warrior adventure, also penned by Mark Gatiss, this saw the Martians as a noble warrior race rather than the alien invaders of the Patrick Troughton years or the galactic peacekeepers that I was introduced with through Jon Pertwee. What this episode ultimately delivered, though, was a link between the two eras. Very nice for long-term nerdy fans like me but, at the same time, not taking away anything from the casual viewer who may not have remembered episodes from the late 1960s or early 1970s.

I think this was one of Mark Gatiss’s better episodes and much more accessible than last year’s Sleep No More. It may also be his last as he has indicated that he doesn’t intend to write for the new show-runner so it’s nice that he has been able to go out on a high. I think the Ice Warriors actually make a good foe simply because they are not just a monster to be defeated. They have their own agenda and are ultimately a martial race but, at the same time, they are capable of reason and a sense of justice. The humans were shown with a reckless stupidity but, at the same time, could be seen to witness the consequences of their actions. I also really loved the Ice Warriors guns. The original weapon made a shrieking sound accompanied by migraine inducing electronic effects on the screen but these, compacting their victims into a ball, were truly original.

However, it was the ending with a cameo by the one-eyed wonder of Alpha Centauri that really stirred memories of the absurd. I was also delighted to discover that this squeaky wonder was voiced by Ysanne Churchman who performed the roll back in 1972 – she is now in her 90s. This, of course, nicely filled the gap between the 60s and 70s Ice Warrior stories and the inclusion of Missy at the end also seems to be hinting at resolving another missing chapter regarding the true nature of the relationship between the Doctor and Master. This Saturday sees the Doctor closer to home, Scotland in fact. I actually had a little inside info on that one but for now I’ll stay schtum.

The Monks Trilogy

I haven’t written about Doctor Who as such for a few weeks. Partly this was due to other distractions but mainly because I wanted to see how the “Monks” trilogy panned out. I’ve been intrigued as to where it was going and in the end it didn’t quite resolve as I expected. Initially, I thought the whole thing was going to explore a “brain in the box” type scenario in which the protagonists are stuck in a virtual reality but aren’t aware of it. In a way, the first episode was this but the others were actually a more interesting and relevant concept: what is truth?

What is the real threat of tyranny? It is possible to force people to act against their will through threats and violence but is it possible to force people to think against their will? We are constantly bombarded with messages to try and influence our thought but what if those messages are a complete distortion of facts. We see this every day with obviously verifiable scientific facts denied by those with their own agenda: whether this is climate change, evolution, carcinogens or whatever else that threatens the position of those in power. What happens when those lies and denials are aimed at things that are not so easily verifiable: we know, ourselves, that we are being lied to and the truth is as we remember it but how does one actually prove it?

So how did the Monks trilogy play this? First things first, I’ll say that this was too long. This has always been a fault with Doctor Who – even back in the day there were many 6-parters (a similar length to a modern 3-parter) that would have been better paced as a 4-parter. The only time that these do work is when the three episodes actually tell completely different stories and the Monks didn’t. In particular, I thought the middle episode didn’t really add anything to the overall story or, at least, it could easily have been merged into the first. Also, the whole concept of the Doctor’s blindness was thrown away for no really good reason. Again, I thought this was to be a major point in the stories resolution in that only the blind can see the truth. Unfortunately, that was discarded for no particularly good reason when the plot ran out of steam.

Having said all that, I did actually enjoy the whole thing and in no small part this was down to the performances of the leads. Really for the first time it felt that the Doctor, Bill and Nardole were an actual team and the revelation of the vault containing Missy, whilst not entirely unexpected, did introduce a particularly intriguing side of the character that has needed exploring: is she actually evil or is (s)he capable of redemption. The humour in the episodes was also spot on – the scene with the Pope crashing Bill’s date had me in fits. The false regeneration scene was also a good red herring. I had wondered whether this would form part of the series arc but it still had me fooled for a moment.

The monks themselves felt rather like a generic Who monster: rather zombiesque (we have seen this with the Silence) and lacking a motive other than ruling the universe. I did wonder, mainly due to the way that they spoke, whether they could be the forerunners to the Mondasian Cybermen which would make sense in terms of their rotten appearance but their modus operandi didn’t seem to match. However, we do know that the men from Mondas are returning later in the series so this is still a possibility.

This weekend sees the return of the Ice Warriors under the pen of Mark Gatiss. He did a really good job with them last time and as far as Doctor Who monsters go they are just that bit more interesting as we never know whether they are going to be good, bad or somewhere in between.

Weak and Wobbly

There is now less than a week to go until the snap (and largely unwanted) General Election. At the moment it doesn’t seem to be quite going as the Tory party envisaged although I have a great mistrust of opinion polling: these sample polls are meant to gauge public opinion but I suspect they are being used to try and lead it: in England, the polls may be overstating the Labour Party’s support to try and frighten soft-Conservative voters not to flirt with Jeremy Corbyn. In Scotland, I think they may be understating Labour and overstating Tory support to try and hoodwink pro-union Labour supporters to vote blue. All this is backed up with an astonishing tirade of slurs, misinformation and downright lies about their opponents. One should ask oneself who is behind this and who stands to gain from it? The only one thing I can say that is true is: Vote Tory, get Tory.

What surprises me in all this is how a party that has lurched as far to the right as the Conservatives have managed to maintain such high poll ratings. Supposedly this is somehow related to the popularity of Theresa May and her robotic “Strong and Stable” message. I can’t see anything remotely strong or stable about her. She is seemingly incapable of streaming a sequence of words together that resemble a reasoned argument and only manages to utter sentences at random that have been pre-programmed into her. This, remember, is the woman that is supposedly meant to be negotiating Britain’s withdrawal from the EU with some of the continent’s best trade negotiators and leading academics. As for stability she has been buffeted around by the deranged bigotry of UKIP and blowing in the wind of whatever whims sociopathic, billionaire media moguls spew in her direction. She is quite the opposite of strong and stable: she is weak and wobbly. Does anyone seriously want to leave her in charge of the country? Personally I think it would be taking a major risk leaving her in charge of the tombola at the village fete.

The problem with all this lies, largely, with our first-past-the-post voting system. It takes a great deal of momentum to even have a chance of being elected in the first place so the only real chance of forcing an extreme political view is to either threaten to take away the votes of a major party in protest (as UKIP have done) or to infiltrate one of the major parties itself. This has been happening to the Conservative party for a long time. At one time the consensus of the party was that of “One Nation Conservatism” a pragmatic, centre-right philosophy intended to be broadly appealing to the masses – largely similar in nature to Christian Democratic parties in mainland Europe. The change seems to have started in the late 1970s with the rise of Thatcherism and a rejection of the post-war consensus. Her successor, John Major, was a One Nation Conservative but by then the damage was already done, notable by his problems with the “SH1Ts.”

There are still a small number of One Nation Conservatives left (the Tory Reform Group is a dwindling band of these) but increasingly they have become dominated by post-Thatcherite rogues and scoundrels. Many have joined simply for the opportunities afforded for deception and theft from the state. In a more proportional electoral system these freaks of political nature would have been flung out to the extremities simply because they would have been forced to create a new party or the system would have moderated them out from mainstream politics. The problem for the country is that there are many people who hold perfectly reasonable right-of-centre political views that have nowhere to land their crosses on election day. The last centre-right leader (or at least he started that way) was probably Tony Blair but I can see that those who hold a moderate centre-right viewpoint may be initially sceptical of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. However, for once, I think they should look at what the Tory party has actually become.

Since returning to power in 2010 the Tories have been a disaster for the UK. They claim to want to balance the books but since they have gained power they have doubled the national debt with absolutely nothing to show for it. They have enriched the very wealthiest in society at the cost of everyone else. Initially, it has been the poorest in society who have paid for this: the sick and disabled and those unable to find reasonably paid and secure labour through no fault of their own. They have run the infrastructure into the ground with the health service and education taking the brunt. Their intentions have now been laid bare in that they intend to move on to the moderately well off, in particular those pensioners who have managed to buy their own homes over their lifetimes by removing any assets they have via the dementia tax. Meanwhile, they are forcing an increasingly large number of people into outrageously expensive rented accommodation with little chance to afford their own home. The rents largely benefit a small minority of rich property and land owners. This is not One Nation Conservatism; it is a return to feudalism.

The question is, what can we do to actually rectify this? In the long term, electoral reform must be a priority but that is little help with less than a week to go. I think the real answer is to hang the parliament. Now it must be tempting to take that as meaning a mass execution of the political classes but it is perfectly possible that we may end up with no one party in overall control which could force a return to the centre – particularly as the Liberal Democratic Party could hold sway in any hung situation and are likely to press for the much needed electoral reform. So what I would say is that unless you are convinced that your local Conservative MP is of the centre-right One Nation persuasion to vote for the “Anyone but Tory candidate”. This may mean Labour voting Lib-Dem or Lib-Dem voting Labour or even everyone throwing their weight behind a Green, SNP or Plaid Cymru candidate. There are various websites giving a guide to this such as this one: www.tactical2017.com

So I won’t make any predictions as to what we will wake up to next Friday but I am hoping for a seriously curtailed Tory party. My only prediction is regarding the current Prime Minister whose days must surely be numbered: June will see the end of May.