Month: April 2024

Playlist of the month: Covers

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Screenshot of the Covers Spotify playlist that I created for this blog post.

So I’m leaving this month’s playlist to the very end of the month. Again. This month, I’m doing some of my favourite cover versions of songs – some of which you may not realise were covers. Here’s the Spotify playlist.

  • Natalie Imbruglia – “Torn”. This was Imbruglia’s debut single, and most well-known. If you haven’t seen David Aramand’s interpretive dance version, you should. Most people don’t realise that this was a cover and was originally sung in Danish.
  • Rage of Light – “Lollipop (Candyman)”. British music fans may be less familiar with the original song by Aqua, as it was never released as a single in the UK. I really like this cover by Swiss heavy metal band Rage of Light.
  • Mark Ronson featuring Amy Winehouse – “Valerie”. I’m sure Amy Winehouse would still be wowing us nowadays in different circumstances. She lent her vocals to this upbeat cover version of a song originally by the band The Zutons.
  • Disturbed – “The Sound of Silence”. Disturbed have done some slower songs in the past (Darkness, for example) but this cover of the Simon & Garfunkel song is superb. I much prefer it to the original.
  • Leona Lewis – “Run”. Originally Lewis sang this as part of BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge, but it was subsequently recorded for her album and became a number one single on downloads alone. It’s a cover of a Snow Patrol song, a band that I also like, and both versions stand up well.
  • Aurora featuring Naimee Coleman – “Ordinary World”. This was originally by Duran Duran, but this trance cover version features vocals from Naimee Coleman which were allegedly recorded in one take. A more acoustic version appears on Aurora’s album, Dreaming.
  • My Darkest Days – “Come Undone”. Come Undone is my favourite of Duran Duran’s songs, but this rock cover is also excellent.
  • Bastille – “Of The Night”. This opens with lyrics from Snap’s ‘Rhythm is a Dancer’, but then switches to Corona’s ‘Rhythm of the Night’. I love Dan from Bastille’s voice and this takes Corona’s song in a different direction.
  • Bowling for Soup – “1985”. This was a more well-known version of a song by the band SR-71, but both have different lyrics. There’s also “2002” by Davvn which uses the same melody but updates the lyrics.
  • Kerry Ellis – “Defying Gravity”. This is the best known song from the musical Wicked, and whilst it was originally performed by Idina Menzel, Ellis has also played the role of Elphaba in London’s West End. This version was produced by Queen guitarist Brian May and makes it more of a rock anthem. This is one of my go-to pick-me-up songs.

Is it worth using premium car fuel?

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An AI-generated image of a superhero using a petrol pump with premium fuel.

Regular readers will know that I’ve been having some car issues of late, which has seen it spending a lot of time in the garage being fixed. So far, it’s been running okay for the past couple of weeks, and so I’m very hopeful that there’ll be no more expensive repairs due for a while at least.

At its most recent garage visit, to have the particulate filter cleaned, the mechanic asked whether I was using supermarket fuel. Because, in his view, this was why I was having problems with the filter. Premium fuels – the ones that you pay extra for – have additives which claim to help clean out your car’s fuel line. As well as preventing the filters getting full, they should – in theory – boost efficiency and result in you getting more miles per gallon of fuel. Once the car was fixed, I was therefore advised to stick to premium diesel for a few months.

This was a topic that the excellent BBC Sliced Bread podcast covered back in January last year. There’s also some information from Auto Express and Which? (for which you may need a Which? subscription to read). The consensus seems to be that premium fuels can help keep a car running better, but they only need to be used occasionally. Supermarket fuel – or at least, supermarket petrol – should be fine to use most of the time. And it is generally cheaper than even the basic fuel from branded petrol stations.

As instructed by the mechanic, I filled up with Shell’s ‘V-Power’ premium diesel earlier in the week. You pay quite a bit more – it was £1.76 per litre, as opposed to £1.58 per litre for their standard diesel. For context, £1.53 per litre is the current cheapest price locally for diesel, according to PetrolPrices.com. My tank was low – the fuel warning light had come on – so I paid almost £100 for a full tank. This was £12.65 more than if I’d filled up with regular diesel at the cheapest nearby petrol station.

We’ll see if it makes a difference. Although my car does track its fuel usage in miles per gallon, it doesn’t use a moving weighted average and so it’s prone to fluctuations, making it a bit useless. My car is over 11 years old, and so anything to clean out the fuel lines and injectors is welcome.

I’ve also used some engine cleaner from Halfords; you put this in once your tank is below a quarter full (i.e. three quarters empty) and then take it for a decent drive until the fuel warning light comes on. It recommends that you use it around four times a year, and this may be a better option. Theoretically, it does the same job as the premium fuel, but costs £10-20 each time. Overall, that works out cheaper than paying more for premium fuel.

So, in honour of Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer to the question ‘is it worth using premium car fuels?’ is probably no. You can use supermarket fuels, but maybe pop some engine cleaner in now and again – especially if you have an older car. Or go electric – I’m sure our next car will either be a plug-in hybrid or a fully battery electric vehicle.

Not going out

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No, this isn’t a blog post about Britain’s second-longest running sitcom. It’s about how we haven’t had many days out this month.

As we’re parents who both work full-time, we try to do something fun with our eight-year-old at weekends, and this is often a trip somewhere. Indeed, in March, we had a weekend in London, Sci-Fi Weekender, Snook spotting in York and a visit to East Riddelsden Hall.

But we’re still paying off some of the money that we borrowed to buy our solar panels. And as mentioned earlier in the week, we’ve had to spend a lot of money on our car recently. And if our car reaches the point where it’s beyond economic repair, we’ll need to take on more debt to buy a new one. This, combined with typical changeable April weather, has meant that we’ve tightened our belts and had quieter weekends at home this month. We’ve also tried to have more meals at home, and not eaten out or had as many takeaways. We’re fortunate that we had quite a lot of leftovers in the freezer to work through.

This is partly to explain why I haven’t blogged about any trips out recently. Our trip with friends to see Unfortunate was a bright spot in an otherwise relatively dull month. The good news is that we have managed to save quite a bit of money this month, and can use this to pay off some of the debts.

As for next month? Well, we are planning some adventures for May. I’ll be turning 40 (no, I can’t believe it either) and so we’re looking at having a nice weekend away to celebrate. So hopefully, I’ll have some fun things to write about and new photos to share.

More car-related shenanigans

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An AI-generated image using DALL-E 3 of a small car in a dog kennel in the rain

Last month, I wrote about how our car had been for repairs multiple times in recent weeks. Since then, it’s been back in the garage again.

This time, the engine would only run in safe mode and so it had limited power. We live in the Pennine Hills in England – the emphasis there being on hills – and so had a not particularly enjoyable week flooring the accelerator whilst trying to get up a steep slope at 20mph. I have small Bluetooth OBD-II adaptor (sponsored link) that allows me to read the car’s error codes on my phone using a free app, and this suggested a fault with one of the cylinders in the engine.

My usual local garage couldn’t fit us in, so I tried a different garage. Their ODB diagnostic system was a bit more thorough and identified that, in fact, the engine’s particulate filter was full. They cleaned this out, and also replaced the sensor (since it still reckoned it was full even when it wasn’t) and, for the most part, the car drives okay again now. But this has set us back another £150.

Our car is approaching 120,000 miles on the clock and so it’s not worth much. Whilst it probably cost tens of thousands of pounds new in 2012, the couple of quotes I have had are around the £1500 mark. Which is certainly less than we have spent on keeping it on the road just in the last few months.

Whilst we have been lucky that it wasn’t a more expensive repair, we certainly need to look more keenly at replacing the car in the next year or so. I hope there are no more expensive repair jobs required, but if there are, the car is at risk of becoming beyond economic repair.

Butterfly Tale

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Film poster for Butterfly Tale

At the weekend, I took our 8-year-old to see Butterfly Tale at the cinema. It was only released in the UK on Friday, but has been on general release elsewhere as early as October. It’s a joint Germany and Canada production – indeed, the first minute of the film is just the various logos of producers, distributors and funders. I hadn’t heard of it before, and according to iMDB, it’s grossed less than a $1million so far.

The film is based on the migration of Monarch butterflies. The main characters are Patrick, a butterfly with mis-sized wings who can’t fly, and his friend Marty, who is still a caterpillar. Because they can’t fly, they have to come up with a plan to join the rest of the butterflies on their migration.

It is very much a film for kids. Indeed, our eight-year-old really enjoyed it. It’s not a ground-breaking piece of cinema, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend seeing it at the cinema unless you have young kids. The animation and story are nothing special. It’s likely to be the sort of random film that you can let you kids watch on streaming if it’s a wet afternoon and you need some peace. Indeed, seeing as the UK is one of the last countries to see a cinema release, I imagine it’s already on streaming services elsewhere.

Most cinema chains seem to have at least a few showings of it right now. When we saw it, there were only around 10 people at the showing – despite it being at the biggest screen. I suspect it’ll have a rather limited run in cinemas.

Patty Gurdy

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I’ve been getting a little obsessed with the song Melodies of Hope by Patty Gurdy. Imagine folk-pop music, but instead of a guitar solo, there’s the sound of a Hurdy-Gurdy instead.

I’ve only recently come across Patty Gurdy, through her recent collaboration with Alestorm on their recent single Voyage of the Dead Marauder – which is excellent by the way, and a real return to form. She’s apparently quite big on TikTok, although I’ve decided that I’m too old for TikTok which is why I haven’t heard of her until now.

If Melodies of Hope sounds like it would make a really good Eurovision entry, that’s because it was a finalist for Germany’s entry for 2023. Had Patty Gurdy won, she would have represented her native Germany in the Eurovision finals in Liverpool last year, but her song wasn’t selected. A shame, because I expect it would have done really well. As it was, Germany went for Blood and Glitter by Lord of the Lost, and came last.

I also think it’s worth noting that she isn’t signed to a record label, and all her music is self-released. You can sort of tell, as the production values for her music videos are basic. But when her music is this-good, this is merely nitpicking.

Besides listening on Spotify and buying her music at the usual places like iTunes, you can support her on Patreon.

Heat Pump mythbusting

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An AI generated image of a heat pump outside a house

Whilst we currently still have a traditional gas boiler for our heating and hot water, should it ever break down or need replacing, we’ll get a heat pump instead. Heat pumps use electricity to provide heat, and are about three times more efficient than even the newest condensing gas boilers.

There’s a really good visual explainer from The Guardian here about how heat pumps work. Basically, they work like fridges in reverse. Heat pumps extract any heat from the ground or air, and pressurise it using a compressor. The pressure heats the air, and the resultant hot air heats up water. This water is then pumped around your central heating system, or into your hot water tank. Using pressure to heat air in this way uses significantly less energy than heating it directly.

But there’s a lot of misinformation out there about heat pumps. This page on CarbonBrief.org lists 18 myths. Of these myths, 12 are outright debunked and the remaining six are in a grey area. And it seems to be an issue largely limited to the UK; in 2021, we had the lowest uptake of heat pumps out of 21 European countries.

Heat pump uptake in Britain

So why is Britain in particular so behind on heat pump uptake? It seems like political lobbying has a role. Boiler manufacturers are trying to push back phase-out dates, presumably as they have huge amounts of stock that would be otherwise worthless.

But also Britain is relatively unique in the world in that we have a privatised gas network. Different private companies each produce the gas, distribute the gas, and bill us for the gas in our homes. The gas producers can sell this gas on the open market, which is why our energy bills rocketed when Russia declared war on Ukraine and the wholesale price went up. Gas is distributed by the privatised National Grid, and in local areas by companies like Cadent and Northern Gas Networks. And then we pay consumer energy companies like British Gas, Octopus, EDF and e-On to get the gas into our homes. In other words, there’s a lot of money to be made from gas, and therefore vested interests in keeping gas supplies going.

Our move away from gas

When we bought our house in 2015, it was very reliant on gas. As well as a 40+ year old gas boiler supplying central heating and hot water, there were two gas fires, a gas oven and gas hob. We got rid of the two gas fires even before we moved in, and replaced the gas boiler with a more efficient condensing boiler. At the same time, we had a Nest smart thermostat fitted. Then in 2022, we got a new kitchen with a dual electric fan ovens and an induction hob. So our boiler is our only remaining gas-using appliance.

I suspect we would have opted for a heat pump instead if they had been more widely available and affordable. As it is, our boiler is only just out of its warranty period and so it’s not worth replacing yet. But when it is time to be replaced, we’ll get a heat pump. After all, we generate our own electricity using solar panels. It would also mean we could have our gas supply turned off, saving us from paying the daily standing charge. This is currently 29p per day, which adds up to over £100 per year.

Baking our own bread

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An AI generated image of a bread machine made out of clay

For the past year or so, we’ve had a Panasonic bread machine that we’ve used to bake our own bread. We eat bread most weekdays – usually, I have home-made sandwiches for lunch, and Christine makes her own sandwiches at least a few days every week. Whilst we weren’t quite so far down our ultra processed food avoidance journey when we bought the machine, baking our own bread seemed like a good way to stay healthy.

We’ve used the bread machine 2-3 times every week since then. Most of the time, we use it for basic loaves. These just contain contain yeast, flour, butter, sugar, salt and water, or olive oil instead of the butter and sugar. But I’m also partial to a couple of slices of toasted fruit loaf when I start work, and so we use the bread machine for this too. It’s the basic recipe but with raisins added (the machine has a hopper to add ingredients) and a tablespoon each of ground sweet cinnamon (cassia bark) and mixed spice in with the dough mix.

What I like most about the bread machine is that you can ‘set it and forget it’. Most recipes just require you to add the ingredients to the mixing bowl, close the lid, and then it’ll do its thing. When the timer goes, you should have a freshly baked loaf waiting for you. The proving, mixing and baking is all done for you by the machine automatically. You can set a time delay as well, so that you can add the ingredients on an evening and wake up to a loaf the following morning. Most bread recipes take around four hours, but you can bake a ‘rapid’ loaf in about two hours if you double the yeast.

Fancy bread

The bread machine manual comes with plenty of recipes to try, and the internet isn’t short of suggestions either.

If we have time, we’ll make a multi-seeded loaf, which adds sesame and poppy seeds to the dough at the start, and then pumpkin, sunflower and linseeds in the hopper. Sometimes we also make a milk loaf, where you swap out the water for milk.

More recently, I’ve tried a tomato loaf. For this, you swap about half of the water for tomato juice and add some chopped up sun-dried tomatoes. However, you have to add the tomatoes to the dough manually and so it’s not a ‘set it and forget it’ recipe, even if the bread does taste really nice.

The machine also good for proving pizza dough. Indeed, the machine has several dough-only modes where you can take the dough out and cook it in a conventional oven. You can also use it to make cakes, but we’ve not tried that yet.

In future, I may try making soda bread (here’s a sample recipe that I found), which is common in Ireland and swaps the yeast for baking soda and uses buttermilk. I’d also like to try making Guinness bread, again continuing with the Irish theme.

Things to bear in mind

We have had a few mishaps though. Previously, I’ve forgotten to put in the little paddle in the bread pan which mixes the dough. This resulted in a pile of mixture that’s baked on top and raw at the bottom. On more than one occasion, I’ve forgotten to add any water, and ended up with some nice-smelling sand. And one time, the dough rose too quickly during baking and then collapsed, resulting in a dense, inverted loaf.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that home-made bread does go stale more quickly than shop-bought bread. After about three days, any leftover bread is usually only suitable for toast. Of course, you can freeze bread to keep it fresh.

Christine bought the bread maker and so I’m not sure how much it cost, but similar models seem to sell for £180-£200 on Amazon (sponsored link). It’s therefore quite the investment, although you may find that the ingredients are cheaper than buying a good loaf from a shop. Also, the ingredients keep well, so you can buy in bulk. For baking, the bread machine uses less energy than a conventional oven, as it’s heating a smaller space.

I really like having access to freshly-baked bread, and it tastes so much nicer than shop-bought loaves.

Unfortunate – the untold story of Ursula the Sea Witch

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A photo of the encore of Unfortunate the Musical, showing a lit up stage at the Bradford Alhambra theatre

Last week, Christine and I went with a group of friends to see the Unfortunate Musical at Bradford’s Alhambra Theatre. It’s a musical parody of The Little Mermaid, but told from the perspective of Ursula the Sea Witch; indeed, Ariel doesn’t appear until towards the end of the first act.

I suppose you could say that Unfortunate is to The Little Mermaid as Wicked is to The Wizard of Oz. However, Unfortunate is very much an adults-only affair, with plenty of swearing and sex references throughout. The touring version of the show sees Shawna Hamic as Ursula, who is absolutely fantastic, and Ariel is played by River Medway, one of the contestants from series three of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. There are also standout performances by Thomas Lowe as Triton and Allie Dart as Sebastian (and several other roles, including two in the same scene).

It’s very, very camp, as you would expect from a show with more than one drag queen in the cast, and isn’t afraid to poke fun at Disney’s film adaptations. It makes good use of a multi-level set, and Ursula’s character breaks the fourth wall on multiple occasions throughout. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it was worth arranging childcare for our eight-year-old to be able to see it.

Unfortunate is still on a UK tour until July, with some more dates in the North to come, including York, Newcastle and Blackpool. If you like big, camp comedy with original music, then I would heartedly recommend it. I took the photo for this blog post during the encore when photography was encouraged.

Sprive – a mortgage over-payment app

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A screenshot of the Sprive app on iOS

If you’re lucky enough to own your own home, and are paying off a mortgage on it, then you may want to consider signing up to Sprive.

Sprive is an app for iOS and Android, that lets you easily make over-payments on your mortgage. Once you’ve registered, it’ll ask to link to your bank account using Open Banking, and you can then set a minimum and maximum amount to over-pay each month.

The minimum payment can go out on a date that you set, and then Sprive will monitor your current account balance and suggest further payments if you have sufficient money left. Sprive normally gives you a notification a few days before it talks a payment and they’re easy to cancel.

I’m using the absolute minimum amounts – £25 per month, and a maximum of £75 per month. However, even such small additional contributions should mean that we pay off our mortgage earlier. The Sprive app visualises this, and reckons we’re on track to be mortgage-free about 18 months earlier than we would be without over-payments. That translates to around £2000 less interest that we would have to pay otherwise. It’ll also show you what loan-to-value rate you are eligible for, and how much of your house you own. Having bought our house not quite 9 years ago, we now own 55% of it, although this is more due to the house increasing in value rather than our repayments.

Sprive Rewards

As well as siphoning off money from your bank account, there’s Sprive Rewards. This allows you to buy gift cards for many retailers (including all the major supermarkets) where a percentage is then used as a mortgage over-payment. For example, you could buy a £50 Tesco gift card, and have 3% (£1.50) used as an over-payment. You can, of course, use these gift cards for your own shopping, so whilst the savings may not seem like much, they can add up. You can even save 1% with Amazon; when I spent £75 there recently, that 75p has the potential to save me as much as £16 down the line in mortgage interest. I’m not a fan of gift cards, but this is where they can be used to save money.

MoneySavingExpert has a useful mortgage overpayment guide, including what you need to bear in mind. Most mortgage providers do let you overpay up to 10% of your mortgage each year, but it’s worth checking your paperwork. If you over-pay too much, you may pay a penalty for doing so.

If you like what you’ve read, and want to sign up to Sprive, you can use my referral code which is HTWH65PM. This will give you an additional £5 head start – so it’s basically free money, albeit not much and only redeemable as an over-payment on your mortgage.

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