A swarthy face and a dinghy, the only way left to keep warm in Britain
26 April 2025 – UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is
The cost of heating one’s home in the UK is a joke — a sick one. It’s alright if you’re an entitled millennial, as most likely you are still living at home with mum, and, given the prohibitive cost of striking out on your own, most likely will still be living with mum when you are in your 50s. For us old fogeys, however, who belong to a generation who would never have dreamt of living at home with mum, and who left the nest at the age of 15, heating one’s home is past a joke — it’s a travesty wrapped in catastrophe.

I returned to the UK from Russia, where I had been enjoying affordable gas central heating 24/7, to a rambling old Victorian house so cold that I wondered if, in my absence, I should have let the Cryonics Institute use it for cold meat storage. Birds Eye would have had no difficulty in hiding its fish fingers here. And this was during a winter which, once again, was unseasonably mild. Let’s clasp our hands together brothers (many times may help) and thank the heavens for global warming!

Disinclined to hand over my hard-earned cash to insult-to-injury utility companies, who unashamedly explain away the reason for their extortionate tariffs by boasting about the part they play in planet-saving strategies – we invest in renewable energy! – but then go rather schtum at the mention of corporate virtue signalling or shoot-yourself-in-the-foot back-firing Russian sanctions, I, like many other Brits, spent three uncomfortable UK months surviving on rationed gas and electric.
Swaddled in two fleeces, one of which is a British-army thermal, with long johns under my jeans and four pairs of socks on my feet (OK, so I bought them from Primark), I thought of renting the icy house out to special forces operatives training for cold-climate combat. I’m fairly certain that Sir Edmund Hillary and the adventurer Robert Falcon Scott used my house for training purposes before setting off respectively, one to climb Mount Everest and the other to meet his maker in the Antarctic.
As I sat in the smallest room in the house, the easiest to heat, with a hot water bottle shoved up my jumper, I thought how perspicacious it had been to bring with me to chilly Britain a pair of those splendid thick Russian socks, the sort traditionally knitted by winter-savvy and wise babushkas. I put them on over my Primark’s and said hello to my toes again.

Free with every packet of Yester Years’ Crisps:
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Things will get worse before they get worse
Things may seem bad in the UK now, as bad as they can get, but under the lefty jackboot doctrine of ‘tax them to the hilt and raid their hard-earned pension pots’, Starmer’s rip-em-off Britain can only get progressively worse.
As it is, I was forced to set the coordinates and dash off in my way-back machine into the 19th century to enjoy the luxury of a real coal fire, which I cannot do in present England at £13 a bag. Actually, to give the local coal merchant, Cagey Smythe, his due, his smokeless save-the-planet coal does belt out some heat — but at £13 a bag! That’s almost as bad as British pub beer prices, which in some pubs have already reached, and in others are nudging slyly towards, a shameful £6 a pint, or as bad as a farting packet of crisps, which can cost anything in British pubs from £1.50 to £1.90.
Double Diamond may not have worked wonders as the adverts claimed it would, but in 1976, it was 15 pence a pint and a packet of Golden Wonder crisps cost something like 3p. Everything is relative, so they say, and they also lie. Quick, back into the time machine! Take off!

My next time-travelling stop will most probably be Edwardian Britain for a good shave and a haircut by a barber who isn’t Turkish when he really might be Albanian, and whose hairdressers may not be a front for laundering money from his nearby Grow Shop.
UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is
The compelling need to cut my hair and to trim my beard now that winter is on the wane, derives from the uneasy feeling that I am beginning to look like Rasputin would, had he been permitted to continue his natural journey into the later years of his life.

Some self-overrating practitioner of the proverbial art of piss-taking was thrilled to liken me recently to Merlin the Mad Magician.
If that is who I am, I thought, I would go to Dover, go directly to Dover, surpass myself by shouting ‘Go’, and, waving my magic wand, I’d litter the English Channel with row upon row of very sharp objects, dinghy-puncturing objects, adding for good measure the odd sea serpent or two.
What else could we do with a magic wand? I know! We could wave it over Number 10 and transform our Judas government from something disturbingly anti-white British into a patriotic force of old.
But what if the spell was to go wrong, turning our !!*£!-! government into EU-pandering clowns, lovers of Macron and Turdo, driving the country like Edward Smith steered his ill-fated ship towards an unthinkable destiny, its passengers, mum’s millennials and the unfortunate not-yet-borns, passing obliviously up Shit Creek into the blade of the mugging iceberg (Innit!), the tip of which, I have to say, is thrusting its way, in a most rude manner, into my front living room, where I cannot afford to turn up the gas or switch my electric light on. But hey ho and wait a mo! — it would seem as though the dreadful spell has already been tragically cast. ‘It must be the Russians that dun it!’ chorus the British media, led by their Portland Place choir leader, the baton-wielding BBC.
UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is
Turning up the heat these days, the heat that comes from the ring of truth, must be done whatever the cost, if you want to prevent your country from slipping into a leftist ice age. Scott and his brave companions, Dr Wilson and ‘Birdie’ Bowers, are moving into warmer waters, and we must do the same, but preferably whilst our minds, in harness with our collective will, are still above the surface.
I know that it is no easy feat. Nothing worthwhile in life is easy, especially when your jumper has a water bottle up it. There’s more at risk than you first might think, unless you read The Guardian — and then you probably just don’t think. For, in ‘Watch Whatever You Say UK’, it only takes an honest remark posted on social media to get your collar felt:
“Oh, officer, I say, what big strong masculine hands you have!”
“Don’t you masculine me, you heterosexual breeder!”
My country’s gone
My feet are cold
But I must think
What I am told — Net Zero Common Sense

Do you ever have the feeling that somebody’s watching you? >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESdkAsBCZlo
One way of escaping UK woke culture and eluding the big freeze that’s burning a hole in your wallet is to pack your bags and move to Russia. It’s warmer in Siberia in more ways than one than it is in Britain’s Home Counties.
The other way is to build a TARDIS and waft wantonly back in time to those halcyon days when Britain’s coal mines proudly and productively fuelled the fires of every British home; back to the days before net zero, which were days of common sense, when we had more warmth in our homes, considerably more warmth in our hearts and, before Labour got into office, a lot more money in our pockets.

Read my A to Z of how to build a TARDIS, and once you have mastered the art of not turning woman or black, and ruining a very good TV programme, zip back old-days Dr Who fashion to your nearest polling booth and wipe out Labour by voting Reform.
Stopping the boats coming in will stop the migrant hotel bill. There’s an awful lot that could be done with the £7 million that curtailing the boats would save each day. You could build a couple of power stations, squander some on renewable energy and still have enough in reserve to give everyone in the British Ilses £6 for a pint of beer, £1.90 for a packet of crisps, a bobble hat, a pair of gloves and a pink hot water bottle called Cassandra.
No one’s ever said it before, but do these things and do them quickly and we might never have it so good!
NB: Cassandra, the hot water bottle, as seen in the feature image of this post, may well be available from all good adult shops. Keep warm next winter without the risk of gender issues.
Copyright © 2018-2025 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.