Hot hot hot

Chatting in the kitchen (heating blazing away), Stefan was inviting me out to the seaside resort on the Adriatic coast whence he hails. He surprised me by mentioning that he owns three flats there, which, he said, can net 50,000 USD during the summer. The thought of spending a week with Stefan has not the slightest appeal, but in the usual cowardly English way, I made the politely appropriate responses. A few hours later, it had all soured.

I arrive home to find Stefan turning over a letter he's opened. That's addressed to me. Do I go through your post? My heart sinks to see that it's the electricity and gas bill.

"It's not so high," he says, showing me the figure of £218. "No, that's wrong," I say. "No, that's estimated. It's higher than that. I'll take the readings and get a new bill." He didn't understand about estimated bills. "It's a guess," I said, trying to explain. "It's for gas?" he replied.

There then followed an infuriating fifteen minutes in which he argued first that we should only pay £218 because they didn't come round to read the meter, before deploying a ridiculous bit of sophistry where he said that we were paying too much if I gave them the readings now, since that would be the reading on 22nd, not the 15th, the date of the bill.

I took the readings and phoned them through. They were much higher than on the bill of course, given his dedication to changing England's climate to that of Chad by Christmas, and in the meantime, simulating Saharan conditions here at 17 Acacia Avenue. I held the line for several minutes to the company, feeling tense and awkward.

The clerk said the actual figure would be around £421. Four hundred fucking quid. It used to be about 70 when I lived here by myself. And yes, I realise that most people wouldn't sit with a gas ring on in the kitchen rather than turn the heating on, or wrap themselves up for a night's reading with a duvet and a snuggly blanky, but he is more egregiously profligate than I am frugal.

Again, back came an argument about only paying £218. The folly of deferring the extra £200 missed him.

Thankfully, Csilla, with her better English and diplomacy, arrived to mediate. They disappeared for some secret consultation upstairs then came down asking if we had to pay it by 6th March. "Not dead on - there's a couple of weeks' leeway in that." I drank a couple of glasses of wine quickly and didn't enjoy them.

I had made a delicious onion soup from a much used cookery book by Martha Rose Shulman, its desiccated spine unable to hold the segmented book together. Blood red and luxuriously rich in flavour, with caraway, thyme, red wine and rum; half way to being a stew. I had cheese on toast to go with it, proper sunflower and pumpkin seed bread from our new proper bakery and proper organic Lancashire cheese. Looking down at it, I resented Stefan for tinging my lovely soup with unpleasantness over money, made worse by him refusing to acknowledge that he is responsible for the great majority of that bill.

This morning, absolutely nothing has been learned. According to the Met Office website it is now 10 degrees C in Lancaster. You do not need the heating on when it is 10 degrees outside. At 10 degrees, you have two options: an extra jumper, or the pub. And yet, its costly dim white noise courses through the house.