J'accuse: Zero

The Luxembourg Energy Office, known affectionately to the denizens of this city where I live as LEO, has invested in an information campaign intended to illuminate (pardon the pun) anybody who is willing to listen about the future of utility prices in the city. The international cost of acquiring the energy is such, we are told, as to permit LEO to reduce the price of electricity in 2010 by an average of 12 per cent per household.

Yes, it seems that the euro price per kWh is going down from €0.1380 to €0.1215 and this was a direct result of the lowering of prices on the international market (always according to the advert I saw at the cinema today). I do hope that you believe me when I tell you that this bit of relatively trivial information (at least from an islander’s point of view) is not being brought to you in order to make your hairs stand on end with anger at the energy situation in Malta.

I am fully aware that the utilities bill business will not be fading away any time soon back home, but at the same time I did find that the justification for the price cuts did raise a question or two about whether or not we are buying from the same vendors at the international souk. One must add, for fairness’ sake, that LEO has recently been exposed to local competition – a new entry on the market trying to poach away clients of its own from the electricity grid.

None

It has always been an issue that baffles me – this fiction of competition in certain markets that seem to be destined to have only one supplier – if only for logistical reasons. I can understand competition between the cable company and the phone company in the provision of fixed telephony: your voice can be carried over one or both of the systems so when you stick your fingers up at one of the companies for whatever misdeed it has performed, you can easily switch to another. Not only that, you can switch without the need for any infrastructural alterations to your house.

Which is where I begin to ask question with regard to competition in, say, the electricity market. What happens the day you get an alternative to Enemalta for example? You’ve had enough of the state-supported brontosaur? Ok. So you switch to the competitor. Which would only mean that you sign a few papers here and there and then you pay someone different for the same supply and approximately same service – which is presumably being provided at the same costs.

You do not switch to a new grid. You do not get a different supply or quality – it’s just a different manager who takes on the responsibility of the provision and maintenance of the service. That’s the trouble with the new economies – lots of changing faces for what is essentially the same basic service. It’s as though one of those dying institutions known as a grocery store got new management – the man behind the counter who battles with the faulty cash register while talking shop has changed, but apart from that there is no change at all. The sign bears the same name, the same stock of goods is available every week and you still cannot figure out where they keep hiding the corned beef.

Sub-zero

In any case, it is not for me to answer the complicated conundrums of competitive connectivity. I can only thank LEO for the lower electricity bill especially when I consider the current weather conditions in Belair. I am perfectly aware that you may conceive any rant about the weather as a not so exalted form of time wasting but this week the weather IS inevitably the news.

Take the islands north of Brittany just off the continent. The imagery coming from Brittania has been of the gobsmacking variety. Last night temperatures reached -22.5 degrees in Scotland. That’s cold even by Luxembourgish standards. I mean I usually keep Anchorage as one of my reference points on the iPhone thermometer as a minor consolation that someone somewhere in the world is having a colder day than me. Well, I probably will not need Anchorage, Alaska as the pointer to colder climates – Glasgow in Caledonia will do just fine.

At the risk of sounding insensitive I do feel obliged to ask: Whatever happened to global warming? (Readers must note at this point that I am close to violating the self-imposed “three strikes out” rule according to which I am not supposed to ask more than three stupid questions in one article). Global warming or not I did find the BBC news item about the concerns for the animals at London Zoo rather heart-warming. The polar bears must be in their element but I am sure that more than a few of the permanent residents at the zoo will not be rejoicing for this inclement weather.

Transport has been severely disrupted all over the place and I notice that I have developed an all new sensitivity to certain bits of news that would previously not have attracted the minimum bit of attention on my part. Nowadays, whenever I hear of commuters being blocked anywhere for more than an hour in this freezing temperature my heart goes out to them. Having lived in Malta for most of my life, I had no idea how dangerous a blocked highway can be for any traveller. It’s not the risk of car pile-ups or skidding cars that worries most but the risk of being snowed to a standstill while navigating the motorways.

It can be torturously devastating when you are stranded a mere 30 minutes from home and five or 10 minutes away from civilisation with nothing more than the heating system of your vehicle for comfort as you sit back and wait for the cavalry to arrive with the grit and snowploughs. You could be stupid enough and try to walk to safety and warmth but that would probably only result in your frozen corpse being picked up the next morning. I have resorted to carrying a quilt or two in the car for any eventuality although the most prudent thing to do in moments of heavy storm is to sit them out in the comfort and warmth of the domus.

Millennium

The cosy comfort of la maison is conducive to much literary perusal and I must say that the cold spell has boosted my flagging reading count (yes, the blog suffered the consequences of a lovely bout of reading mania). I got to finally turn the last page of Tom Holland’s Millenium – a longstanding bedside soldier. It’s about the run up to the end of the first millenium (as counted by pedants) and is a wonderful basis for getting a good grasp of the growth of Middle Europe.

My recent travels up north have resulted in the boosting of the francophone part of my library. The “Historie de Flandre – Le Point de vue Flamande” is my attempt at complementing Holland’s opus with a ‘local’ perspective purchased from the land of the Ch’ti patois. My fascination with Flanders and everything Flemish has never waned since my year in Bruges. Another friendly book I brought over from Lille’s Furet du Nord (as I see it the frog equivalent of Foyles of London) was an exploration of the concept of the devil: “Le Diable” by Jacques Duquesne. It’s a journalistic investigation – a sort of Chi l’ha visto? of the supernatural. Promising.

Finally, I have also revived a fixation on the master of hermeneutics Umberto Eco. Earlier this year I had bought “Vertige de la Liste” – an enquiry on the use of lists in history. Things were going quite well with this particularly picturesque edition until disaster struck. You see, Vertige had been appointed as my toilet book of choice – a chapter a visit would see the lists fizzling down to zero long before the Christmas meals. Unfortunately my “toilet books” are normally placed on a stool that is directly under the basin’s serpentine tube… which decided to leak (the pipe not the stool). Thank heavens that my dad was visiting and he could revive granddad’s hobby of book medic – the essence of the book was saved and I could go on appreciating the role of lists in the history of humankind.

Eco does not stop there. Knocking at the door of the priority reading list are two other Eco works. One is called “Turning Back the Clock” – a series of essays on “hot wars and media populism”. It all falls in squarely with my current preparatory research on a theme I like to call “the development of homo internetensis”. As the Internet and media progress continues to revolutionise the very concept of homo sapiens, we continue to study the side effects. One of these possible subjects is the potential “death of the book” as discussed by Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco in the book “N’espérez pas vous débarasser des livres” (Don’t hope to get rid of books).

Zero squared

The main worry in this case is the rise in popularity of the ebook readers. These little machines can contain hundreds of books in electronic format and are menacing the very existence of the old medium of books. I feel guilty in contributing to this early demise but I am still awaiting a Sony Ebook Reader in the post – it should be here any day and I will report whether the drawbacks and advantages in the book versus ebooks war are as they are generally made out to be.

I’ve been quite submerged in updating my digital existence as you can probably note from this article. There has not been much to notice on the island and what may have been noticeable might have escaped my attention while I tweaked an image database here, played around with a blog format there and got generally frustrated with the number of cables and wires I needed to be able to maintain my panoply of gadgets.

It may sound like a sad existence – one that is dedicated to the constant “updating” of software and gadgetry (we might need at least an hour of this daily very soon). If it is not updating we are charging or transferring. All of this we do in order to interact with these new symbols of this new society. A brilliant documentary on the BBC (History of Now) is currently chronicling what happened in the noughties (a decade that has just ended for most but the absolutely pedantic). Our aspirations have changed drastically from those we might have held as late as 1999. Science and technology have a lot to do with that… and the funny thing is that we might not notice it before we are too late.

In the end nothing

This one has been quite a ramble. An old man once told me that when you have nothing to write about you should best not write anything at all. I could see his point and probably in any other decade he would be right. The thing is that this is a blogger’s column – one that is inspired by random thoughts on everything under the sun. And even were I to discover that 98 per cent of what is written is too much of a ramble for anybody to take notice it would still have been worth the while for the remaining two per cent.

Consider this a warm up for the new year of punditry worth cutting out and pasting into a scrapbook. I’m currently having a look under the bonnet of J’accuse the blog, so go easy with the hits and comments. We’re tuning the engines, updating the info, uploading the data and getting ready for 2010.

And we’re kicking it off from zero… pedants permitting of course.