On Being Robbed and Being the Amen Bit.

I’m watching the thermometer in my office fall slowly but inexorably day by day until the last syllable of recorded time as autumn begins to assert its presence. In other words, my house is getting colder.

I’m resisting the urge to introduce any form of heating into the old place, you see, because all forms of heating in here require electricity, and electricity is insanely expensive these days. Pressing a switch to engage with the flow is a little scary, so maybe I should briefly give the back story to explain my predicament.

Thirteen years ago I was horribly insolvent – through no fault of my own I hasten to add, but that didn’t alter the fundamental fact. For some years I’d been economising to the hilt in order to subsist and declining to declare myself bankrupt because that sort of thing is anathema to me. And then my situation improved a little and I was able to begin the long climb back into the black, which involved continuing to economise to the hilt so as the keep the process moving forward. Eventually the black was reached and I carried on economising in order to build up a meagre amount of savings (the extent of which would probably have my better-off neighbours chuckling with derision, but at least it’s something and at least its mine.)

And now I’m faced with the prospect of losing those savings – or at least a substantial part of them – through having to pay exorbitant prices to my energy supplier who say they have to charge them because the wholesale suppliers are good capitalists who like to celebrate the making of record profits so as to pay their executives and shareholders large sums of money they don’t need and might never be able to spend. (I assume you can only have so many private jets and swimming pools, can’t you? Not that I have the slightest interest in private jets or swimming pools, you understand, but there’s a principle involved. It’s my meagre savings they’re using.)

So that’s why I’m sitting with a cold nose and cold fingers in a cold office in a cold house reading Maddie’s Field Journals book. It’s taking me back to those autumn days nine years ago before the onset of health issues, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, increasing mayhem caused by climate change, and the overall cost of living crisis (not to mention the years of Tory administration during which the rich have become even richer and the poor even poorer.)

But here’s the nice bit…

I did something this evening which I never usually do: I skipped briefly to the end of the book to see whether there was an epilogue of some kind (I always think of the epilogue as ‘the amen bit’.) There was no epilogue, but what I found was this:

These field reports were originally published by Maddie in the form of a blog which I followed assiduously, and they’re reproduced here complete with the comments entered thereon by the various readers. And guess who entered the very last comment. I did, so the very final words in the book are mine. I think I might be allowed a tear or two at that revelation.