I had the immense pleasure of talking food and fuel poverty with Margi Clarke this week. Me and she met many years ago when we filmed The Good Sex Guide together. The episode I featured in never made it to your TV screens due to a combination of high spirits and too much white wine before lunch. Let’s just say we talked about everything that was on the producer’s list of things-we-absolutely-must-not-talk-about. Hey ho.
Our conversation this week was a bit
more serious than body piercing and al fresco sex. We discussed the crisis of people old and young starving and being unable to turn on the heating through the winter.
Then Margi told me about the viral video of the guy heating a room for 8p per day with 2 plant pots and 4 tea lights. “It’s true” said our Margi “the shops in Liverpool are selling out of plant pots.”
Tonight the temperature is going to plummet and this means that my bloody fridge freezer will stop working. It lives in my unheated utility room and because all fridge freezers are made to a rubbish, minimally insulated standard nowadays, when the temperature drops it can’t cope and decides to heat itself up. This means that unless I heat the room tonight, all my batch cooking curry and Bolognese will end up in the bin.
A tea light burns for four hours so Ged is about to start making 8 hour mega tea lights from old candles and my pudding moulds. I will report back with my freezer findings in the morning.
