Mild weather in London today (15 C) and supposed to stay the same until the middle of next week.
I don’t know how wholesale gas is priced these days. There was an unsuccessful gas futures market with cash settlement at the National Balancing Point, an imaginary location somewhere in the Midlands. The real gas came onshore at Bacton in Norfolk. I went there once on a coastal walk and it was a dump. It needs levelling up economically and to prevent flooding. But I digress; gas prices are sky high and, for a change, people with oil central heating should be feeling smug.
The mild weather means that we have switched off the central heating and multiplied by households across the south of England that reduction in demand may ease the squeeze, at least temporarily. It will make it practical to meet outdoors over the New Year which may reduce Covid infections, so win-win except for the natural world that is being fooled into thinking Spring has sprung.
Meanwhile Chips is desperate to evacuate his only child, Paul, to the United States.
“Thursday 20th June 1940
I dashed to the steamship office to get Paul’s ticket: it was a dingy place in Gerrard Street, which as I waited seemed indescribably romantic and smelly! It had an Italian atmosphere. The Northern Transport Co seems to be an apiary.”
As bees are not smelly and Italians not noted for being industrious I can only assume Chips meant an ape house. Similarly he seems to think “the French fleet is safe in Scottish waters, some parts of it escaped from Toulon to Oban”. I think he was misinformed or misunderstood as I think the French Mediterranean fleet escaped to Oran in Algiers. Both unimportant details in the great unfolding picture of war depicted so comprehensively by Chips.
As food and petrol were strictly rationed how was Chips able to give dinner parties almost daily or motor to his own or other people’s country houses every week-end? Perhaps MPs had an unlimited petrol allowance? But surely they would have been subjected to the same food rations? If food was sent from the various Guinness estates he doesn’t mention it. And what about the large quantities of drink consumed? Although the 1920s Krug runs out at 5 Belgrave Square sometime in 1942 there seems no shortage of inferior vintages or of spirits. And it is not until 1943 that his butler is called up – but fortunately he seems to have no difficulty in finding a replacement. And he levels no complaint about the quality or quantity food or drink served up at the many lunches and dinners at the Ritz, Dorchester and Claridges. It seems another case of one one law for them and one law for the rest.
If you love these diaries you will love A CONSTANT HEART: THE WAR DIARIES OF MAUD RUSSELL 1938-1945 edited by Emily Russell. At some point in 1943 Maud finds herself at Claridges without her ladies maid and as a result finds she has to wash her own hair for the first time in her life….