by Henry VIII gets a smart meter installed and is confronted with the true cost of his own baths
I once believed nothing could monitor me more closely than my own Privy Council. I was wrong. It is a small grey box in my hallway, and it never stops watching.
The Installation
An engineer named Baz arrived to install the device, explaining it would allow me to track my energy usage in real time, a sentence that filled me with the same unease I once felt reading a letter that began Henry, we need to talk about Anne. Baz was cheerful throughout. I was not. By the time he left, I owned a screen capable of judging me every hour of every day, silently, the way Wolsey used to judge my spending on banquets.
The First Bath
That evening I ran a bath, a modest one by the standards of a man who once had water heated by an entire kitchen staff on standby, and returned to find the little screen glowing red, informing me I had used more energy in one hour than my average day. I felt genuinely persecuted. I have started wars over less pointed criticism than a glowing red light in my own hallway.
The Price Cap
My manager Dev later explained the energy price cap, a limit set by a regulator on what suppliers may charge per unit, adjusted every three months, a system I found almost admirable in its restraint until Dev clarified that the cap itself still went up regularly, and that capped, in this context, does not mean what I assumed it meant. I capped taxation on the clergy once. It meant something. This apparently means the ceiling simply moves higher and everyone is asked to be grateful it did not move higher still.
The Standing Charge
I was equally troubled to discover a standing charge applied daily regardless of usage, a fee for the privilege of being connected at all, whether or not I run a single bath. I once levied a similar tax on land ownership regardless of whether the land produced anything, and I recall it being wildly unpopular. Nobody has stormed the offices of my energy supplier yet, but I sense the mood building, mostly from me.
The New Habit
I have since taken to checking the little screen obsessively, the way I once checked reports from my spies across Europe, anxious for any sign of betrayal. Baz warned me this happens to everyone eventually. He called it meter anxiety. I call it the closest thing to genuine democratic accountability I have experienced since returning to this country, and I do not entirely enjoy it, but I have not once been able to look away.
The Truce
Baz returned a month later to check the installation and found me on genuinely friendly terms with the little grey box, having accepted that honesty, even hourly and unflattering, beats the alternative of a quarterly bill arriving as a complete and horrifying surprise. I once preferred flattering ignorance to inconvenient truth in nearly every arrangement I ever made. The meter has quietly cured me of that particular habit, one glowing red hour at a time.
This sits nicely alongside the rest of the ongoing story over in the chapters. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: the Bank of England holding rates steady out of sheer stubbornness, interest rates frozen until the economy agrees to behave, the full eyewitness account of how I came back in the first place.
