Ron Godfrey

Beano: A Quietly Relentless Force for Better Systems In an age of performative outrage and short-form hot takes, Beano moves differently. He is the kind of person who notices that electric cars make some people feel sick, then immediately starts hunting down the exact low-frequency deceleration studies in the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction. He reads the Autumn Budget line-by-line not to rant on social media, but to work out precisely how many extra pounds will land in a pensioner’s pocket next April and whether the Cash ISA carve-out for over-66s is deliberate generosity or an oversight worth protecting. He visits a car museum in a Somerset village he can’t quite name, remembers the smell of the café and the way the light fell on a 1968 Mini, and then quietly reverse-engineers which one it must have been. This is his signature move: he sees the world as a series of solvable puzzles, and he refuses to let sloppy data or lazy narratives stand in the way. He didn’t set out to become a one-man think-tank on energy transition, fiscal policy, and battery degradation curves. It just happened because he hates being fobbed off with half-answers. When a salesman tells him an EV battery is “good for 500,000 miles,” Beano’s brain instantly translates that into depth-of-discharge tables, calendar ageing, and the difference between NMC and LFP chemistries. When a politician claims the state pension triple lock is “protected,” he cross-references OBR spreadsheets to confirm the real-terms gain. The habit started decades ago in engineering rooms and boardrooms where imprecise language cost real money, and it never left him. Retirement, for most people, is a chance to stop checking the tolerances. For Beano it was simply permission to widen the aperture. What marks him out is the tone he brings to all of it: no superiority, no lecturing, just a calm, collaborative insistence on getting closer to the truth. He will happily argue with you for three rounds about whether charge-point operators will ever turn a profit, concede a point the moment the data shifts, then five minutes later ask what postcode you’re in so he can pull the latest Zapmap density map and see if your local Tesco pod is still stuck on 50 kW. The arguments never feel personal because the mission is shared: make the numbers work, make the systems fairer, make the future cheaper and less nauseating for everyone else. Underneath the forensic curiosity is a deep, practical decency. He worries about pensioners who don’t have the time or the spreadsheets to spot that the frozen prescription charge actually saves them £40 a year. He gets genuinely annoyed that public charging is 20 % VAT while home charging is 5 %, because it punishes people without off-street parking. He keeps a mental ledger of every policy that quietly tilts the playing field away from the people who most need the EV switch to be affordable. And then he does something about it: a perfectly worded letter to an MP, a nudge to a local councillor about the LEVI fund, a question in an online forum that forces a charge-point operator to publish their real uptime stats. Friends describe him as the person you want sitting next to you when the plane hits turbulence: he’ll already have read the safety card, calculated the glide ratio, and worked out which exit has the least queue. Yet there’s nothing cold about it. Precision and warmth are not opposites in Beano’s world; they are the same impulse directed at different targets. He still drives the same unassuming EV he researched for eighteen months, the one whose battery he babies between 20 % and 80 % because he ran the numbers and knows it will still have 92 % capacity when most people are on their third ICE car. He charges at home on an off-peak tariff, but he keeps a running note on his phone of every public charger he uses, its price, speed, and whether the contactless reader actually worked first time. That note now runs to hundreds of entries and has become minor internet legend among a small circle of EV owners who treat “Beano’s List” the way sailors once trusted the Admiralty Pilot books. If you ask him what he’s trying to achieve, he’ll shrug and say he just wants things to work properly, for ordinary people to stop being ripped off or short-changed by complexity they didn’t ask for. He has never started a podcast, never chased followers, never once called himself an influencer. He simply refuses to let the world stay fuzzy when it could be sharp. That, in the end, is the Beano-shaped dent in the universe: a persistent, good-natured demand that systems should be transparent, numbers should add up, and no one should feel sick in the passenger seat of progress if we can possibly help it. The revolution will not be tweeted by him. It will be measured, annotated, cross-referenced, and gently insisted upon until it finally arrives.