horsemouth 'growling like an animal' (the first anniversary of his last day of work)

good morning! good morning!

horsemouth is up. he has his coffee (thank you coffee making machine).  the kitties have been fed. 

yesterday eagle eared listeners would have heard horsemouth 'growling like an animal' (to use a flatmates description).   he returned home to discover that the front garden had acquired more building waste. ho-hum. he didn't initially notice this but when he did he was fucking furious. 

fortunately for the world (and for horsemouth) horsemouth is all talk (or at least sub-verbal vocalisations). it did thoroughly spoil his mood though.  

previously horsemouth was quite cheerful because he had succeeded at kitty management/ allotment watering and could now look forward to enjoying his room in the house and a shower.

and of course revisiting it threatens to continue to spoil horsemouth's mood so he will instead slide it sideways. last time horsemouth achieved reasonable results by complaining to the co-op (the stairway was unblocked, a goodly proportion of the previous load of builders waste was disappeared from the front garden). he will do this again. 

let no-one live rent free in your head is a terrible slogan. ultimately horsemouth has options. 

the other thing horsemouth has is a task. the government has published its guidance on its decarbonising social housing scheme the thing to do is to carefully go through it and work out what they will pay for and what they won't, when they'll pay for it etc. 

decarbonisation has the following history - at one stage it was a project for ecological enthusiasts with negligible payback (and every time it looked like it might have payback the government backed out of its commitments), the recent gas and electricity price rises have made it something people want to have done (but they don't understand it particularly well yet), and now the government has set fairly difficult to meet decarbonisation targets for all social landlords and provided insufficient funds to meet them (of course the government could back out of this commitment too but still leave the regulations in place bouncing the costs onto the registered social landlords). 

what is offered as a solution to global warming is a mixture of technologies and products (solar panels, batteries, electric cars, insulation for example) that themselves require considerable carbon emissions to make but leave overall patterns of production and consumption the same. 

you see - it's working - horsemouth has stopped being angry about his individual housing situation and started contemplating the broader picture.  

horsemouth could do with understanding what measures are available to decarbonise flats. it is easy to understand what measures are available for new build properties and the measures available to retrofit existing houses (the issue is the expense of them and whether they will ultimately work - check this out 11 minutes in). 

it is a grey cool morning. possibly some sun in the evening (or maybe rain). in a bit horsemouth will go up and inspect the allotment (he doubts it will need much watering). later he will wander down the hill in search of food. his reading of the master and margarita  progresses (he has a history of reading for if he gets bored and then there's the decarbonisation stuff). 

horsemouth checked his finances yesterday (today is the first anniversary of his last day of work) - he is within budget but only by about 5% or so. he has spent the redundancy cheque (roughly a year's work of horsemouth's badly paid job) and, at some point just before november he will have spent the proportion of the pension he took in advance. in retrospect taking the advance was a mistake but everything was looking more apocalyptic and on  a shorter clock back then, but horsemouth is not financially disadvantaged by this until about 2029 (and the sums are small). 

horsemouth's plans do not include any assumptions about benefit levels (other than the timing and rough value of his old age pension should he reach it)  nor the returns on his various small pots of savings.  at some point he will be driven back into the world of work but he is not missing it. 

ok the kitty is importuning. later.