BRITISH Gas offers a variety of help to its customers, which is worth being aware of if you are struggling this winter.

The UK’s biggest energy supplier was founded back in 1812 and has over eight million customers.

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The company has been running a number of schemes to help its customers who are struggling financially.

It comes as millions will see their energy bill rise by £149 this winter after Ofgem‘s new price cap came into force earlier this month.

Households previously paid £1,568 a year but the figure is now set to rise by nearly £150 to £1,717.

The government has also axed its £300 Winter Fuel Payment for over 10million pensioners who are not on means-tested benefits.

Free cash to help with energy bills

British Gas has a fund open to pre-payment meter and credit customers who have found themselves in debt worth up to £1,700.

The Individual and Families Fund was first set up in 2021 to help households struggling with energy debt.

This scheme’s support is available to British Gas and non-British Gas customers.

However, if your provider is Ovo Energy, E.ON Next, EDF Energy, Scottish Power, Octopus Energy or Utilita it asks your go to them for assistance first.

There are certain criteria that you need to meet to be considered for the Individual and Families Fund, including:

• Pre-payment meter customers must have between £50 and £1,700 of energy debt
• Credit customers must have between £250 and £1,700 of energy debt
• You live in England, Scotland, or Wales
• You have not received a grant from the British Gas Energy Trust within the last 2 years
• You must be seeking a grant to clear an outstanding debt on a current or open gas, electricity or dual fuel energy account
• The account must be in your name and relate to your main residence
• You have received help from a money advice agency within the last six months

Customers with energy debts worth more than £1,700 will not be eligible for support through the fund.

You can check out your eligibility for the scheme here.

Match debt repayments

Earlier this year, British Gas also launched a £15million “You Pay: We Pay” initiative.

This scheme works by matching 100% of a customer’s energy debt repayments to help them clear their arrears faster.

For example, if a customer pays £100, British Gas will pay off £100, too, effectively wiping half the amount owed and getting them back on track sooner.

The scheme opened in June and June and eligible customers will be contacted directly – they won’t need to apply.

A detailed assessment will be made to determine if customers qualify for the scheme but broadly, they must:

• Be in or facing fuel poverty
• Must have obtained or will obtain debt advice 
• Have been a British Gas customer for at least six months
• Pre-agree a payment amount following the assessment

You must be a British Gas customer for at least six months to be considered.

Help with energy bills worth £150

British Gas is giving eligible customers £150 worth of extra cash through the government’s Warm Home Discount scheme.

The payment is issued to those on the lowest incomes and is designed to cover the additional heating costs over the colder months.

Households in England and Wales don’t have to apply to get the cash and receive it automatically.

However, some Scottish households do have to apply for the discount.

Eligible households get the cash credited to their electricity bill between October and March 2024.

To qualify for the Warm Home Discount, you need to claim either the guaranteed credit element of pension credit or a different means-tested benefit, including:

If you weren’t claiming any of the above benefits on August 11, 2024, you won’t be eligible for the payment.

What other support is available?

You do not need to be a customer at British Gas to get help with your energy bills this winter.

 EDF has a customer support fund which on average wipes £1,250 off customers’ bills. 

It is available to vulnerable customers experiencing hardship. 

To apply, visit EDF’s website and make sure you have details of your account number (find it on your energy bills or EDF emails) and the current debt balance on all EDF accounts you have.

Meanwhile, Octopus Energy offers a range of support, including cash from its Octopus Energy Assist Fund.

It could also include loaning a thermal imagery camera to find heat leaks in your home, which you can fix to reduce energy usage and your bill.

It also conducts home energy visits to discuss how households can reduce their usage and gives out free electric blankets.

You might also be able to get help with essential costs from your local council through a programme called the Household Support Fund (HSF).

The funding is designed to help people who are vulnerable or can’t afford to pay for necessities like energy bills, water bills, and food.

Some councils offer food vouchers to families during the school holidays, as well through the scheme.

Eligibility criteria vary by council, so you need to check your local authority’s website to see what’s available and how to apply.

PASSENGERS have been left fuming after being forced to check in their hand luggage – only to find the overhead lockers empty anyway.

Several disgruntled travellers took to social media to share their fury – targeted at multiple airlines.

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One United Airlines passenger posted on X: “thank you for stopping me on the jetway saying the overhead bins are full and I have to check my bag.

“Really appreciate you lying to our faces to save yourself time but cost me time on the backend.”

The passenger went on to say they’d been forced to part ways with their bag despite paying for priority boarding.

They said: “Glad priority boarding comes with no perks anymore.”

Another passenger, who had boarded an American Airlines flight from San Luis Obispo, USA to Dallas, USA, wrote: “So angry rn @AmericanAir.

“Was just forced to gate check my roll aboard because I was told the overhead space was full.

“This is the overhead bin directly across from my seat. #AmateurHour.”

A second American Airlines customer posted a picture of empty overhead lockers to the r/americanairlines subreddit, saying: “Weird experience with gate agent checking bags.”

It comes as European passengers learn they will likely experience a hike in flight prices as several airlines bump up hidden costs.

This includes an increase in seat reservation prices by the Lufthansa group – affecting Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa and Swiss Air.

Meanwhile, Wizz Air passengers were furious to discover their flights had been cancelled amid a confusing “technical issue” impacting the airline’s booking system.

This came after a frustrating summer for flyers, with 40,000 Brits affected by ongoing air traffic control issues last month.

However, jet-setters did receive the more encouraging update that airlines across Europe were working to set standardised rules for hand luggage dimensions.

United Airlines and American Airlines have both been contacted by the Sun for comment.

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Tractor Supply bills itself as a “rural lifestyle retailer”. The Tennessee-based company became a stock market darling during the pandemic as more Americans moved away from cities and took up hobby farming. Post-Covid, even as other pandemic trends like Pelotons lost their appeal, the homesteading lifestyle has stuck. It turns out millennials really like growing their own chickens, vegetables, and fruits.

All this has been a boon for Tractor Supply. The company, which sells everything from chicken coops to cattle gates and tractor parts, pulled in a record $14.5bn in revenue across its 2,216 stores last year. That compares with the $8.3bn it took in 2019 and works out to a 15 per cent compound annual growth rate for the period. 

Wall Street has noticed. Tractor Supply’s share price has nearly tripled since March 2020 to give the company a market valuation of over $30bn. That is despite the controversy over the company’s decision to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and climate goals following pressure from conservative activists.

Climbing to the top of the retail pecking order is one thing. Staying there is tough. Tractor Supply’s revenue is expected to grow just 2.4 per cent this year. Tough comparatives are to blame. The numbers also do not look too shabby considering big box retailers like Target and Lowes are expected to report flat or lower sales this year. 

Still, with Tractor Supply shares trading at nearly 27 times forward earnings, compared with its three-year average of around 22 times, the stock will struggle to keep rising from here in the near term.

For investors who take the long view, Tractor Supply remains a decent bet. Unlike large commercial farms, which have been hit by falling crop prices, the company’s core customers — hobby farmers, small ranchers, suburban and rural homeowners — are little affected by ups and downs of the agricultural commodities supercycle. 

The company’s specialised focus — providing small-scale farmer everything they need to raise their chickens or heirloom tomatoes — gives it a formidable economic moat. You can’t buy 40lbs bales of chopped hay or live chicks and ducklings on Amazon or Temu. An emphasis on selling its own private label brands offers another advantage. Its ebitda margin of about 13 per cent is more than twice that of Walmart’s.

There is room for further improvement. Tractor Supply should make more of its one-stop shop business model and expand more aggressively into adjacent product categories like gardening and plants. It can and should take market share from the likes of Home Depot and Lowes.

pan.yuk@ft.com

SHOPPERS are racing to get their hands on an energy gadget after its price was slashed from a whopping £99 to just £9.99 and it will help keep the heating off.

With energy prices still high and the winter fuel payment cuts affecting thousands of pensioners, finding ways to keep warm this winter is proving challenging.

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However, the EGL 2000W Oil Filled Radiator could be the money-saver households are looking for.

The easy-to-use heating device has been reduced by a staggering 90 per cent after its price was slashed from £99 to £9.99, saving shoppers an eye-watering £89.01.

Several shoppers left great reviews about the product on HotUKDeals, with many eager to get their hands on the portable radiator.

One user wrote: “These are great to have, only heat one space in the home rather than the entire thing, I’ve used them for years.”

“Ordered mine, fingers crossed,” another added.

A third said: “Absolute steal.”

And a fourth shopper commented: “Very good deal.”

The EGL 2000W Oil Filled Radiator is estimated to cost around 50p per hour, meaning an 8-hour day would add up to £4 in total.

This would make it “cheaper to stay at home rather than driving to work and staying warm in the office,” another user added.

Unfortunately, this deal is no longer available but there are still similar heaters for discounted prices on offer.

Shoppers can bag themselves an Electric Freestanding Oil-Filled Radiator for just £26.99 from Screwfix.

Similarly, Amazon has stocked up on heating devices, with the cheapest portable radiator selling for just under £30.

B&Q’s Oil-filled radiator is currently scanning for just £24.

Ways to save this winter

Heated airers are a great way to save money when you can’t dry your clothes outdoors, but they’re not the only gadget you should seriously consider investing in.

Heated throws are great for keeping warm without switching on the heating. Pop one over you while you’re on the sofa watching TV, drape one over your bed – there’s even one from Lakeland you can wear. They offer several temperature levels and often have timers to automatically switch off.

Dehumidifiers remove moisture from the air and when it’s drier in your home you tend to feel warmer. They can also be great for drying washing and some brands even have a laundry setting.

Air Fryers are the kitchen must-have of the last few years. They generally cook food quicker than your main oven does and in less time, using much less electricity.

Heavy or lined curtains can help keep out the cold, while draft excluders not only help keep cold air out but warm air in.

Before it gets really cold and you turn to your central heating for the winter, check to see if your radiators need bleeding. It’s a simple job whereby you use a radiator key to release any build-up of air bubbles that can stop the radiator from functioning effectively.

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On a desk at his studio in Somerset House in central London, artist Lawrence Lek keeps a Buddha bobblehead. The protagonist of his latest film, an AI “carebot” therapist designed by the fictional Farsight corporation to treat other AI creations — self-driving cars, surveillance programs — is named after the Buddhist goddess of compassion, Guanyin. A series of sketches depicting the character’s evolving design are pasted on a wall, culminating in the figure of a friendly toy robot. “Farsight would want to make a cute, appealing avatar for their full-surveillance empathy-AI system,” Lek says drily.

Lek’s oeuvre, spanning film, music and video games, presents visions of the near-future, placing AI characters in subversive contexts — a satellite hoping to become an artist, a rebellious self-driving car banished to a rehabilitation centre. Farsight serves an antagonistic function, exploiting legal loopholes and its creations’ emotions as means of control. The work poses ethical questions about situations that might arise soon in reality. “It wouldn’t exist without us,” Lek says of AI. “We are bringing this thing into existence, like a kind of cosmic child-slash-sacrificial victim or scapegoat-slash-divine god all at the same time.”

“Guanyin: Confessions of a Former Carebot” is Lek’s commission as winner of the 2024 Frieze Artist award and will be installed at the Frieze London fair next week. It follows the character, for which Lek uses gender-neutral pronouns, as they move through a desolate cityscape, stopping in a scrapyard where malfunctioning self-driving cars have been discarded. “You’d think that carebots are a happy bunch,” they say, before revealing that insecurity is a part of their programming.

Lek, 42, was born in Frankfurt to Malaysian-Chinese parents working in the aviation industry. He trained as an architect at Cambridge and Cooper Union in New York, before receiving a PhD at the Royal College of Art. One of the questions his thesis explored was what it would mean if the artificially intelligent non-human were to be held legally liable, something he explored in his film “Empty Rider” (2024). It depicts a self-driving car on trial for the attempted murder of an executive. “How ironic would it be if an AI gained legal personhood not because a group of activists say, ‘Let’s give robots their rights,’ but [because] companies make them the scapegoat?” Lek says. The film is a “kind of tragedy” about this scenario.

Born out of counterfactuals, Lek’s practice yields intriguing ideas. In earlier works, he questioned what would happen if universal basic income and mass automation meant that humans could play video games all day. “In this future post-work society, what if everyone is slightly lobotomised?” he says. Or what if, at a hotel for the very rich, the staff were replaced by Orwellian surveillance drones and facial recognition?

The presentation of Lek’s work is often in the form of what he calls the “site-specific simulation”, in which the character of the space itself becomes central to the installation’s immersive quality. In 2019, on the site of a former freeport in Basel, he conceived of an exhibition imagining a future retrospective of his own work in 2065, mounted by his production studio — which, in a self-referential nod, is registered as a company named Farsight. (He is drawn to the notion of hyperstition, the idea that “fiction becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy”, he says.)

Despite its speculative premise, Lek’s practice is equally concerned with the shadows cast by the past. “I’m really interested in the relationship between science fiction and nostalgia, or science fiction and memory,” he says. At the 2024 Sydney biennale, a multimedia installation entitled “Nepenthe” (the medicine for sorrow in Greek myth) recreated the ruins of Beijing’s Summer palace, destroyed during the second opium war by an Anglo-French force in 1860. Within the installation, a film presented alongside a video game takes viewers on a journey through an island “filled with spirits and ghosts”. Across a ravine, the reconstructed palace ruins come into view. Nepenthe is not only an “antidote for sorrow” but a “drug for forgetting”, a robotic voiceover intones. “If you want to keep on forgetting, just keep on walking.” The trope of an idealised past in dystopian fiction imbues Lek’s art: “There’s a sense that there is a perfect world that has been lost.”

The fact that you can create a feeling or condition of empathy and engagement and immersion with purely synthetic means is quite a magical thing

In “Guanyin”, memory manifests as something viral, precipitating a kind of psychosis among Farsight’s creations, which are touted by the company as “emotional machines with a soul”. Guanyin runs through a list of their patient’s problems — unprocessed guilt, depression, anxiety, anger. “Do we agree that existence is suffering?” Lek says. “Do we agree that, for the superintelligent being, their existence might have some suffering involved?”

Guanyin’s patient is afflicted with intergenerational trauma — a diagnosis with which a human viewer, bearing the weight of ancestors past, might identify. But for AI creations, Lek believes, the scale of suffering approaches almost sublime proportions as they become aware that their high performance has come at the cost of thousands of previous machine generations.

Lek’s wish is to elicit in viewers a sense of connection with his AI protagonists. “Everything that I’m doing is technologically mediated, constructed, determined, rendered,” he says. “The fact that you can create a feeling or condition of empathy and engagement and immersion with purely synthetic means is quite a magical thing.”

October 9-13, frieze.com

One evening in 2021, my wife abruptly pressed a book into my hands, telling me that I needed to read it. The book was Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter. When I asked her what was so urgent about it, she replied, just a little testily, “Well, you’re writing about anger, aren’t you? If you’re interested in women’s anger, you can’t not read this.” It was the story of a lone woman on holiday, living in the shadow of her decision years before to leave her husband and young daughters in a fit of desire for an unencumbered life. As the novel sucked me into its vortex of female fury, with Leda, its narrator, “screaming with rage” at the burdens of maternal responsibility, my wife’s insistence that “You need to read this” began to weave itself into my reading of the book, creating another front in its violent ambush on my nerves. When I finished the next morning, I found myself asking what it was my wife wanted to tell me. Did she want, after 22 years and raising three boys, me to hear her “screaming with rage”, at them, at the world, but mostly at me: “Do you get it now?”

Is there a more reliable source of rage than marital life? The angry strife of couples is a mainstay of comedy, tragedy and melodrama. Jane Austen’s plots drive towards the declaration of love and the gleefully accepted marriage proposal. But these happy endings are woven into stories peopled by married couples riven by resentment and deep mutual alienation. One has the impression that Emma Woodhouse’s mother preferred to die than spend another day married to Mr Woodhouse.

These contrasting images, the happy glow of the bride and groom and the disaffected frown of the long-term couple, bring out the paradox that the love and companionship we spend so many years yearning for turns out to be the root of so much frustration.

Perhaps this stark contrast has something to tell us about why long-term relationships arouse so much anger. In it we see a young couple radiating love and hope, fully invested in their life partner as best friend, confidant and lover. Almost every new couple, in other words, begins their life together with a sentimental ideal of coupledom as a haven of affection and support. There is little room in this version of the future for the more difficult feelings that arise between couples over time: resentment, disappointment, hate and anger. The effect of this is to turn anger into a kind of emotional foreign body in the marital bloodstream, an alien presence that shouldn’t be there.

The love and companionship we spend years yearning for turns out to be the root of so much frustration

But what if we have this wrong? What my wife’s gift of the novel was communicating, I think, was that the ordinary run of marital and family life provokes levels of anger — around unequal divisions of domestic labour, a dearth of affectionate or sexual attention or of emotional support or financial contribution — that we’re too fearful to acknowledge. Too often, this leads to a build-up of resentment that erupts in explosive rows and bitter stand-offs. What if, instead of assuming a normative state of harmony and mutual ease in marriage, we began from the premise that rage is built into the matrimonial set-up, and might even be necessary to it?

Anger is a feeling: an emotional state rather than a performed action. This distinguishes it from its more dangerous cousin, aggression, which involves the drive to do things in the real world and which can produce violence, conflict and fear.

The root of aggression is, perhaps surprisingly, a fear of dependency. When we resort to screaming rows or coiled, furious silence, we are discharging our anger in reflexive behaviours rather than really feeling and speaking it. In other words, we are tacitly choosing aggression over anger, action over feeling. This impulse is both inevitable and human. When we’re hurt by the person we love most, we’re put in contact not only with feelings of rage and disappointment but, more fundamentally, dependency and helplessness. It is easier to shout at or insult a partner than to acknowledge the fact, which in moments of vulnerability can feel so humiliating, that we need them.

Marriage is the willing entrance of two people into locked-in proximity. It places us in close range of another’s needs, desires and anxieties, all of which arouse and amplify our own. The question seems to be less “Why would marriage make us angry?” than “Why wouldn’t it?” How could intimacy with another person not provoke at least occasional feelings of desperation, isolation and rage?

The story of a patient of mine (disguised to protect confidentiality) might help us to think about the ways anger can corrode a nine-year marriage, as well as how it might change it for the better. Few people I’ve seen in the consulting room have arrived more cut off from their own vulnerability than Stella. In our first meeting, she told me she’d come on account of her marriage becoming intolerable. Max was “irredeemably useless” as a husband, father and lover, for all his talent as a cardiologist. “He knows all about hearts,” she said archly, “with the mysterious exception of mine.”

Our sessions quickly became brutal yet forensically precise dissections of Max’s manifold incompetencies. He would dress their little girl with her skirt on back to front, drone on at dinner parties about advances in coronary medicine. He could go a week without asking Stella a single question about her life but come the weekend he would clunkily propose “You know . . . a bit of fun upstairs?”

I realise now that in those early weeks I was too ready to ride the wave of Stella’s biting wit, to enjoy these attacks as though they were performances rather than an expression of deep anger. Her unhappiness came home to me a few months into treatment when, pale and downcast, she announced that her husband had left her, telling her that she clearly had no use for him.

Too disorientated to speak, I responded with silence, provoking an avalanche of enraged and no doubt overdue reproach: “That was one big, expensive miss, no Prof? You are the psychoanalyst! Why didn’t you say something instead of just sitting there uselessly?”

Then it came to me. Stella had been furious with me all along. The man she’d been talking about and eyerolling all those weeks, the man who knew neither how to listen nor how to communicate, who might have a good enough reputation but was no use to her wasn’t only her husband. It was also me.

This is a well-known phenomenon in psychotherapy known as transference, in which the relationship with the therapist replicates previous patterns of relating. To make sense of those patterns, Stella needed not just to describe them to me, but to play them out, to become as angry with and contemptuous of me as she was with her husband and so many other figures in her life.

Hundreds of hours of self-reflection spanning seven years followed. Stella came to see that her character had been formed, above all, by her relationship with her mother, who had given up fulfilling work as a GP to raise her and her sister. Having assumed she would take to child rearing with ease and pleasure, her mother was in some shock at the sheer boredom and nervous exhaustion motherhood induced in her. She had seemed to Stella forever on the verge of unravelling.

Stella’s brutally high-handed irony was rooted in a repudiation of her mother’s neediness and sensitivity. If she cast everyone around her as useless, she could never be made to feel dependent on anyone. She cultivated a rage that helped shore up her invulnerability and confirm that no one, not her husband nor her psychotherapist, could give her anything — love, interest, pleasure, care — she really needed.

If she now wanted her husband back, and needed an analyst to understand herself, then who was she? In therapy, she began to enter regions of herself she’d long avoided, most of all the abandoned child with a yearning for a mother’s curiosity and attention, and a rage at the failure to provide it. Our work opened her eyes to how depriving her default mode of contempt had become, how much it had deepened the isolation she’d sought to protect against.

If Stella’s marriage was now long beyond repair, she herself wasn’t. A shift occurred in her relationship to herself and others. She no longer viewed Max with exasperation, finding in herself both sadness and compassion for the emotionally fragile man who had simply wanted to love and be loved by her.

She became different with me too. Instead of incinerating her humour, her anger gave it just enough heat. Being angry, she realised, could be a way of feeling rather than annihilating her feelings.

Perhaps here we can discern the contours of a different kind of relationship, one in which strong and difficult feelings might be used to strengthen intimacy rather than corrode it. Stella and Max had both entered the marriage imagining that it would fortify them where they were most vulnerable, that she might become less fearful of her own emotional needs and that he would become more robust, less squeamish of conflict and hostility.

The opposite happened. And in here lies a lesser-recognised truth. Real intimacy not only renders the other person more familiar to us, but also brings into relief the depth of their difference from us. What neither Stella nor Max could do was recognise and embrace the latter. Stella was enraged that Max wasn’t tougher, Max was dismayed that Stella couldn’t be softer.

What they couldn’t do was give one another the space to feel differently. Intimacy is not just about the pleasure of easy harmony; it’s also about making space for difficult and unsettling feelings to be spoken and heard. This allows anger to be experienced as an essential dimension of love, rather than a hostile force wearing it away.

When my wife handed over the Ferrante book, she was choosing not to scream at me in rage. She was telling me, I think, that she wanted me to know something about her experience of motherhood and marriage that I hadn’t been aware of, even she hadn’t been fully aware of herself. Perhaps that’s why she communicated it through someone else’s words.

I’d like to think that if we stopped thinking of rage as an aberration, our most important relationships might ultimately become more peaceful. Can we learn to stop fearing the anger of those we love most and start expecting it?

Josh Cohen is the author of “All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World”, published by Granta on October 10

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