Inside the box was a meter-kind-of-thing, part of which is a
sensor which you clip around your electricity cable, part of which is a display
unit that picks up wireless signals from the sensor and converts tiny magnetic
pulses into a read-out of your electricity consumption. Or something like that.
We’ve already had one of those for months, and to be honest
it’s never given a readout that was anywhere near the harsh reality of the
quarterly bill, so that hasn’t been bothered with.
Also inside the box was an egg-timer. When I say egg-timer,
I mean a device wherein a quantity of sand or other fine-grained particulate
passes from an upper section of a container to another lower section by means
of a gravity feed through a constrainment
or bottleneck, the quantity of sand (or other particulate) having been
measured to ensure that the transfer will take a set period of time, no more,
no less.
This particular device is a shower timer: it’s a flattish
egg-timer which has a suction pad on the back so you can whack it on to your
bathroom tiles and then, when you next have a shower, set the thing running and
attempt to be lathered, shampooed, rinsed off, out of the water and at the
towel rack before all of the sand (etc) has trickled through.
The purpose of the thing, apart from giving small children
something new to play with (and as children, small or otherwise, are not
welcome in this establishment, play will not happen) is that by keeping your
shower time to within its limit, you save water and power and thus money.
All quite laudable. If only there wasn’t this Thames Water
branding all over the thing.
Thames Water is a formerly public-owned company which, in
the period between its privatisation in 1989 until it was sold by its German
owners to Kemble Water Limited (which was set up expressly to buy Thames Water
and is ultimately owned by McQuarry Holdings, an Australian consortium) in
2006, failed to meet a single Ofwat target for leakage reduction; which still
today loses 673 megalitres – that’s 673 million litres of water per day
through leakage; which has consistently failed to meet Ofwat demands for
increased investment in infrastructure to reduce this leakage; and which is
telling me and the rest of the country that, right now, we cannot use a
hosepipe because we are in drought even though it’s been raining heavily for
the last three days…
…And they’re telling me to cut down my shower time.
However: the shower timer, and the ‘hippos’ that you can put
into your cistern (though why waste money? A rock from your back garden or a
brick from next door’s decorative wall will do the job just as well and cost a
fraction of the plastic models), and any of the other water-saving devices
we’re being asked to use in this ‘difficult time’, in tandem with the
advertising currently being run by Thames Water which asks us to consider
others during this drought, have another purpose.
They’re transferring the onus for water conservation during
the drought, and the high level of water wastage, away from the supplier and
onto the consumer. If there’s a shortage of water, it’s not Thames Water’s
fault because they didn’t spent on infrastructure. It’s not because if they had
spent money on infrastructure it would have reduced the amount of lovely profit
they could give to their shareholders. Of course it’s not! What kind of fantasy
world do you live in, for heaven’s sake? You haven’t been taking showers in
less time than Roger Bannister could run a mile. You haven’t been filling half
of your bathroom with lumps of petrochemical by-products! So don’t you see it’s
all your fault?
And because it’s all your fault, Thames Water can feel entirely justified and incredibly innocent
when they use the shortage of water as an excuse to crank up their prices next
year. Or sooner. Probably sooner.
There’s one more thing. When I got home on the day the timer
arrived, I took a shower. I didn’t rush, nor did I tarry; I just had my usual
get-rid-of-the-sweat shower. It took less time than the timer had allocated.
But since then, I’ve found myself staying under the spray until the timer runs
out. In other words, I’ve increased my shower time, and thus my water
consumption per shower, by at least a third.
Ha, Thames Water! Stick that in your pipe (but don’t lose too much of it through leakage, eh?).
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