How I finally learned to love my eco-home

Nine years ago, when I invested every-thing I had in a part-rent, part-buy, one-bedroom, government-backed eco-home which proved to be a boiling box in summer, my first instinct was to throw myself out of a window – but I couldn’t because they opened only ten centimetres. My second was to complain about it in The Spectator. Now, I return to update you on my energy bills. Prepare to turn green with envy.

Friends who live successful sorts of lives – involving houses, spouses and gardens – exclaim ‘Oh, so you weren’t joking about living in a J.G. Ballard novel?’ when they come around for the book launches I host in my living room, before asking if I can open a window. ‘I can actually,’ I boast. ‘The restrictors were removed on humanitarian grounds and a man in the block next door fell out and died last year in circumstances still unreported in any newspaper.’

But last night, I asked a WhatsApp group of these friends how rising electricity bills were working out for them. ‘They wanted to put our monthly payment up to £920 – which would have been £11,000 a year,’ complained one, who lives in a cottage. ‘They’ve agreed to take £720.’ Someone else found hers had gone up by £6,500 a year and intends to sleep in a tent in the garden this summer, while another said he’d concluded his was a misprint comparable only with his latest tax bill.

As for elderly people on fixed incomes, the situation makes anyone with an ounce of compassion feel unwell. In January, the Daily Mirror reported that a 98-year-old D-Day veteran was living on a pension of £220 a week and spending £134 a month on electricity – even though he was careful to boil just enough water for one cup of tea and was only putting his immersion heating on every other day.