Front Page · National Energy Resilience Desk
Man Insists Energy Bill "Barely Moved," Finishes Fourteenth Nationally For Saying So
The number barely moved. Fourteenth place disagrees.
He checks the bill at night, after she is asleep, brightness turned all the way down. The new direct debit lands at four minutes past midnight. It is eight pounds more than September. He reads it once, in the dark, and says nothing to the room.
Shame, like energy, performs better when spread evenly across the year.
He takes a screenshot, the way he always does, and deletes it before the screen can finish loading. Tonight is the latest in a run he stopped counting months ago. He is sick into the toilet, phone still in hand. He checks his League position before he flushes. He has held fourteenth, and is, for a moment, pleased with himself. He goes back to bed as if he had only gone for water.
At breakfast she asks if the bill went up much. "It's fine," he says. "It only went up a bit." He had checked the number so many times he had lost count, then said it anyway.
His bank has also been checking. Its fraud system flagged his groceries as inconsistent with a man who claims to be this poor. It passed his file to the new Energy Resilience League. He was ranked within the day. He finished fourteenth in the country. Hundreds of thousands of other men were doing the same thing, each one sure he had invented it.
His supplier's letter arrived the same week. It did not apologise for the increase. It congratulated him on reaching Silver Resilience status, given to customers who check quietly at night. Silver carries a badge, a newsletter, and a slightly higher direct debit. "Shame, like energy, performs better when spread evenly across the year," said a spokesman for the League. He was not asked to explain this. He did not.
He has told nobody that he checks the leaderboard more than the bill itself. He assumed he was the only man awake at midnight doing this. Position thirteen was already taken. It had been taken for months, under a different set of initials, from the same postcode, on the same account.
Neither has mentioned this to the other. Both are still saying it only went up a bit. The League logs this as one shared household result. Nobody in the house has said a word about it.
This newspaper's own energy bill rose this month too. We have not entered the League. We did not need to. Our accountant already ranks us against our competitors. We have asked him to stop telling us where.