11 March 2022 (Friday) - Having A Malfunction

I woke feeling full of energy and raring to go only to see it was twenty past one. I then dozed fitfully for the rest of the night listening to Treacle sucking the duvet and feeling progressively more and more grotty as time went past.

I thought better of saying “sod it” and phoning in sick, got up and watched an episode of “Trailer Park Boys” which (it has to be said) after eight seasons was getting to be rather “more of the same”.

I sparked up my lap-top and peered into the internet. Facebook told me that I had been made a “top fan” of Viz comic’s Facebook page. I wonder why? I can’t say I look at that page from one week to the next. And my MP had been out and about. He’s quite active on social media. He actually does very little himself, just seems to use Facebook to somehow take the credit for what other people have been doing.

 

I had an email from geocaching HQ. They’ve added something to their Adventure Lab so that you can now select a theme for any Adventure Labs that you have built… A theme ?! Seriously? Their messaging system is still crap (at best), their official app is inferior to every other geocaching app there is, you can’t load caches on to your GPS without third party software, they don’t have the ability to stop people cheating on the GPS-based part of the game, in order to even do the hobby (without *major* inconvenience) you need to buy someone else’s software, and still they fart around with utterly irrelevant fripperies like “themes”.

 

I set off west-wards to Pembury on a rather bright morning. As I drove the pundits on the radio were talking about the Ukrainian situation and about precious little else. Whilst the situation there is dire, of the one hour and twenty minutes or radio that I listened to this morning, about one hour and ten minutes was focussed on the Ukraine. I listen to the morning radio to find out what is going on in the world; not to become an expert on the BBC's spin on one small part of human activity. Mind you there was a five minute section on the massively increasing price of petrol. Here's an eye-opener. Take a litre of petrol:

 

Current (this morning) average cost 159.57 pence.

Of that:

Wholesale price (oil production & refining) 56.38 pence

Wholesale biofuel price (that goes in with it) 10.7 pence

Delivery and distribution costs 1.7 pence

Retail margin (forecourt costs & profit) 5.59 pence

Duty 57.95pence

VAT (20%) 26.59 pence

Greenhouse Gas Obligation & Development Fuel Obligation 0.654 pence

 

So the litre of petrol costs about seventy-four pence, and  about eighty-five pence of the price is tax. Over half of the cost of every litre of petrol we buy is tax. There's something to write to your MP about.

 

I wasn't originally supposed to be working in Pembury today, but I was glad that I was. I got to stop off at the little shop in Sissinghurst which has a rather good beer selection. And with beer bought I then got to watch the rather good road rage which kicks off at that bottleneck where seemingly no one is prepared to give way to anyone else.

 

Work was work. It would have been a quiet day had we not spent most of it having a malfunction (as you do).

And with work worked I came home. “er indoors TM” boiled up dinner and we watched the second episode of the second season of “Star Trek: Picard”. Bearing in mind what a disappointment the first season turned out to be, so far this new season is rather good.

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