It is interesting to see a news channel launch with a different style and a different target audience. I think it is probably a good thing to have some variety of presentational styles in our news output, and GB News is clearly aimed at people who feel ill-served by the other major news programmes. I haven’t watched much of their live output, but I’ve seen plenty of clips shared on social media so far this week.

I quite like the idea of the hosts expressing their personal views, particularly where they don’t coincide with one another, and therefore don’t parrot a channel-wide editorial line.

Initial impressions are that the sets, lighting, sound, and camera work all look cheap. So cheap that some of the interviewees have better setups at home. Maybe it is an intentional choice, to distinguish themselves from the high-tech well-lit professional Sky News and BBC News. Or maybe they didn’t have much money and launched in a hurry.

I have also learned that I largely agree with whatever Andrew Neil says, and I disagree with almost everything that Dan Wootton says. Opinions on other hosts will develop over time.

I used to drive around a fair bit. To Dundee on a weekly basis. Around town. For shopping. Occasional trips further afield. A couple of thousand miles per year.

In the past year I’ve driven the car a handful of times, the furthest distance probably being 1½ miles to the St Andrews hospital. At most, tens of miles since March last year.

This summer we are thinking of driving down to my parents in Nottingham, and then on to Salcombe in Devon for a family holiday. I now find the idea of driving that kind of distance extremely daunting, and increasingly find the idea of making a short trip to a nearby town to “test my vision” quite a reasonable thing to do.

I’m really not sure that I can safely spend hours driving, concentrating at the road ahead, since I am so out of practice.

qidane pointed me towards Earth & Wheat, who do a weekly subscription of 2kg of “wonky” bread. I thought it sounded interesting so have signed up — we’ll see what turns up in a couple of days.

Earth & Wheat

It is fresh bread that otherwise would have been discarded. Makes one wonder why bakeries are making so much wonky bread in the first place.

Anyway, less waste seems a solid goal. And “wonky” is a good word.

Since the beginning of lockdown, it has been obvious that people who don’t agree with government rules call them “confusing”, and the BBC News facilitates this by airing their complaints and fermenting the confusion.

Witness WATO today. Plenty of wannabe holidaymakers complaining about the travel restrictions. Can’t help thinking that anyone who wants to travel internationally during a pandemic is quite loopy.

And the airline industry always sounds very weaselly on the issue. I would not trust Willie Walsh’s advice on travel safety, since he has such a strong financial incentive to get people traveling.

All this talk of traffic-light signals… do people not know what amber traffic lights mean?

Twice now Deliveroo have refused to refund me for items missing from an order. And have offered no explanation.

Since the middle of last year we’ve grown to depend on Deliveroo for our regular grocery deliveries. Most weeks I place an order with Aldi and an order with Morrisons, and between the two, we get much of what we need to feed us for the week.

Our Aldi orders occasionally have missing items, and our Morrisons orders often have missing items. We’ve learned to check everything when it arrives, and mark the missing items on the Deliveroo website for a refund. Which has worked well.

Until the beginning of this month.

The refund process changed on the Deliveroo site. Now one has to upload a photograph of a receipt when one makes a report of a missing item.

Morrisons do not provide a receipt.

A fortnight ago Deliveroo refused a refund for a missing item (an Easter egg at £4.20), and didn’t explain why. I was annoyed, but assumed it was a glitch, and couldn't be bothered to follow it up at the time.

Until it happened again, with today’s order. Deliveroo refused a refund for another missing item (Quorn Bacon at £2.10 for those keeping track at home). Again, they didn’t offer a reason for their refusal. This time I did follow it up.

I received a cheque through the post today from Utilita for £1,076.94.

Which was nice. I didn’t expect it, and I like it when I receive an unexpected grand. But also worrying, ’cos I couldn’t remember having had an account with Utilita, and there was no explanation in the covering letter.

I sent Kate off into St A to pay the cheque into the bank. Into our old RBS account, as I have no idea how to pay a cheque into my Monzo account. This is the first cheque I’ve received in years.

Then I had a good search through my emails and scanned letters. I use a service called Flipper to automatically switch to the best energy deal, so I barely know who my actual supplier is at the best of times. Turned out that we’d been with a company called Eversmart when they went bust back in 2019, and my account had been automatically transferred to Utilita under Ofgem’s “Supplier of Last Resort” process. And then Flipper had moved me on to a new supplier. I’d paid attention to the new supplier, but not the intermediate one.

Utilita sent me a letter back in May 2020 confirming my final Eversmart bill, and noting that my account was £1,076.94 in credit. It took them eleven months to get a cheque to me.

I find it quite eye-opening how many people are complaining about the television schedules having changed this weekend. In this world of online streaming and virtual box sets, do that many people actually watch broadcast television? And if so, why?

Of course, maybe they don’t actually watch live television, but just want to complain about it anyway.

A bank holiday is a day to get things done at work. My English colleagues have their bank holidays off, but in Scotland we work through and have floating holidays instead.

While most of my immediate colleagues are also in Scotland, somehow the English bank holidays feel like some of my most productive working days. There are fewer interruptions, fewer meetings, and just a few fewer Slack messages.