pumpkinstrokemarrow

Presently squeaking up the left-overs for tea, following a hard afternoon's shopping in Kingston, now being fully converted to the merits of the shopping bus from Chessington World of Adventure. £2 return each, no reduction for freedom card holders, bus every ten minutes. A lot cheaper and faster than messing around with the car all the way there.

Interested to see that the computer services and instrumentation industries might be getting a good multi-billion pound project off the government blocks before the public expenditure chopper falls. It seems that there is a plan to put a gadget in every home which will collect readings from meters for gas, water and electricity and send them off to some central meter reading exchange, which will then pass them on to the relevant supply company. All of which will require adapting every existing meter, adding a new gadget to every home, building the data collection network (to be piggy backed off the mobile phone system it seems) and the central exchange. Lots of work for all kinds of people. Can't remember anything like it since the conversion to North Sea gas in the early seventies. Furthermore, households can opt to have the smart version of the gadget at £25 a person or £100 a family with free biennial chipgrade and a free annual newsletter. This smart version will do things like detect smoke, heat, light, alcohol, nicotine and the volatile derivatives of recreational substances. This will enable the emergency services to attend in good time and the gadget to provide you with personalised lifestyle advice 24 by 7. It will also know what television programmes you are watching. All you have to do is to tell the thing from whom you buy your various services so that the readings can be routed to the right place.

Perhaps by the time New Labour is back in power, the time will have come for us all have chips implanted in the lobes of our left ears, chips which will be able to talk to the gadget which we were originally told was all to do with reading the gas meter. This will mean the the lifestyle advice could get really personal. The same chip would probably also be used as identification in banks, immigration desks and the like. Savings all round. Harriet Harman rules! Give the lady a fag.

On the subject of the public expenditure chopper, it would be fun to be a fly on the wall and watch all those fancy projects justified ever so recently and with much expenditure of paper, pomp and committee time, on the grounds of all sorts of benefits and savings in the future, being canned. Savings in the hand worth more than savings in the future when the credit ratings people are sniffing at the door. All this invest to save has got to stop.

To close, I retail some bank stuff from the DT. It seems that despite all its cataclysmic headlines about HMG mismanagement of the sorry saga of RBS, that said HMG is set to come out ahead, mainly as it is charging RBS handsomely for its bail out. And RBS is still making enough dosh going forward to pay the charges.