"Welp," sighed the former whelp, "That's that."

"Good morning,

I spoke with your office yesterday regarding having received a notice of disconnection from BES Utilities for my business at 72 Victoria Road. I have been there since August 2018, so nearly five years, and it has always been my mission to provide the best food I can to the people of this neighbourhood for under £10. We were in The List's top restaurants in Glasgow in the last eating and drinking guide pre-pandemic, which I thought was incredible since we were up against some of the most expensive and large venues in the city, and Nanika only seats 14 people and a dinner for two will come in under £30 even if you really gorge yourselves.

It has been closed for the past six months due to an injury (I had tendonitis and could not use my left arm, so I operated a different business at my other shop on Allison Street while I was doing physio), so the only electricity usage would be the refrigerators and dehumidifier that are always running, and the occasional prep day and dishwashing where there would be very minimal drain compared to actual service, when the extractor fan/pasta boiler/steamer/bain marie/rice cookers, etc would need to run concurrently for at least five hours per night.

If you are familiar with the shop you will know it is literally one small room with one lightbulb, maybe 50 square feet. It is, I believe, the smallest functioning restaurant/takeaway in Govanhill. And I would like to reiterate that it has been closed, and thus its electricity usage has been as low as possible from the 20th of April to the 10th of November, when we reopened. We were similarly closed last year from May to September while I set up the other shop, with all the same equipment running at Nanika, and our monthly electric bill was £225 on average. That is the baseline for a closed shop, with £350 being average for the times we are operating normally.

I have had a direct debit set up for the electric bill since 2020, and I do not normally pay attention to the total, as it has always been consistent. In October, however, for the period of 15th September to 15th October, I received an invoice for just under £900, which is more than double the previous month's invoice. It is also almost double the monthly rent.

As I did not have £900 in the account, I immediately cancelled the direct debit and tried to contact BES, but their web interface was not functioning, and after managing to speak to an agent via chat he informed me that he couldn't even authorise anyone to call me back. All he would do is insist that I reinstate the direct debit. I explained that there is no way a closed shop could possibly use £900 in electricity, and that I wanted an engineer or other professional to come out and check the supply to determine what could be drawing that much energy or if someone else had somehow accessed my wiring. Eventually he agreed to have someone call me. I received two calls in November from BES, both of which were dropped due to poor connection on their end, as I spoke to them on the restaurant's phone, which we use every day we are open to take orders. There is no signal loss inside the building and the phone is on wifi anyway. When I attempted to call back the number was outgoing only and would not re-connect me to BES. (As an aside, I am wondering why so many companies nowadays use dead emails and blocked numbers to communicate with their legitimate customers; why is it legal to contact people about their accounts from a means of communication that can't be used to return the contact? And why would you want that?)

I then received a second bill for 15th October to 15th November for another £900 without explanation nor resolution, along with an intent to disconnect notice. When speaking to the disconnection agent he told me that if I did not give them £1100 in 24 hours they would remotely cut the power, and that if I didn't have £1100 then it would show that my business wasn't "economically viable" enough to continue operation.

As you can imagine, someone quadrupling one of your monthly bills after five years of consistent operation and then calling the business economically unviable when that is the sole reason that it would be so is as insulting as it is laughable.

Either someone is illegally using electricity from my meter (it is a shared building), or BES has literally quadrupled my energy costs in under six months, which would be completely unsustainable for ANY business, let alone one as small as Nanika.

I have attached several monthly bills and invoice summaries, etc. for your examination, as well as a small flyer I put on my window in September, before I received the first startling invoice. As you can imagine, Brexit and the post-COVID economy have driven my cost of goods up significantly. Literally every item I need to buy in order to make food for my customers has increased in cost in the past 12 months. I have raised my prices by 50p from their 2020 levels, and my profits are significantly decreased. Some months I even lose money, but it has always been more important to me that normal people can afford a good dinner in this neighbourhood and that they can count on the restaurant being there for that purpose.

A main at Nanika is £9. A bun is £4. A person making minimum wage can get dinner for the cost of an hour's work. Apparently I should be charging £13 for the thing you can hold in your hand and £34 for a chicken katsu, if we're going by the BES maths, which would be wildly out of the reach of my neighbours, friends, and fellow Govanhill residents.

If these figures from BES are accurate then Nanaika must close immediately. It cannot absorb the cost of their naked greed. Obviously the energy consumption would increase with regular weekly operation, and if it miraculously costs almost a thousand pounds just for the shop to sit empty what would it cost to actually sell food?

There is no possible way that BES could need to increase costs by 400% to cover their expenses unless they are simply willing to let people literally die to maintain or exceed their already astronomical profit margins, which would be repugnant from a restaurant but should be literally illegal from a utility company. The difference between Nanika and a utility company is that nobody needs Nanika to keep their house warm in the winter, or to keep medical equipment running for the sick and dying. They don't need buns to see when the sun sets at 3:30pm, and to keep their groceries from spoiling.

I hope to hell there has been a mistake, or that some illegal activity is to blame rather than just corporate greed and government complicity pairing to literally kill off some citizens for money this year, because while I have been here for ten years and tried my best to improve the city/country I cannot and will not contribute to that sort of behaviour. It is morally bankrupt and disgusting, and can have no positive consequences for the UK and its actual people going forward.

Please review the attached, and let me know your thoughts.

Thank you,

Justin Valmassoi"

Just in case you were wondering why we're closed this weekend and every weekend thereafter, that is the letter I sent to my MP this morning, but I already know the answer. There is no cap on commercial electricity, so the energy company doubled my bill in April and then doubled THAT in October, and will continue to do so while making record profits, just like every other privately-owned utility company in the UK because nobody will stop them. I work 70 hours a week. I have been doing that for years. I will not do it so that BES can make more per week than I do while thousands of their customers will literally die this winter in shivering poverty. Fuck them and fuck those that created the situation, and continue to allow it to progress. And fuck the "small businesses" that lie about their energy woes, and the "community interest companies" whose entire business model is apparently based on borrowing money from the taxpayer, and somehow still charge triple what any other business charges for the same items. I will not be holding a crowdfunder so the community can pay twice. Without Nanika I will not be able to afford my visa renewal either, so what I really need is someone to take my pet when they deport me, as airlines do not allow lizards to fly on them. Believe me, I have checked.

This country is broken. I came here because mine was too, and I thought the people here were smarter, but it turns out they were just on a slower path to the same point.

I have not always enjoyed my job, but I have always enjoyed my customers, and seeing/feeding you week after week, year after year. You are the best, and I wish you all a tolerable Christmas and independence from Westminster's insane policies in the future.



Thanks, Govanhill. Happy holidays, etc.