If you haven’t been yet, I really recommend going to see Grayson Perry’s The Vanity of Small Differences, on display at Salisbury Cathedral until 25 September. It’s a quite extraordinary collection of six tapestries, echoing William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress by telling the story of Tim Rakewell’s rise and rise through Britain’s class system. I don’t pretend to understand all the nods and references to the different religious paintings embedded, but the rich detail of modern life rewards those who have time to linger over the work. I loved the spoof Penguin Classic mugs in his middle-class kitchen: Class Traitor by Chip E Prole.

Speaking of friezes (see what I did there?) that’s hopefully what the government will have announced regarding gas and electricity prices by the time you read this column. It’s hard not to be worried by the threat of rising bills and I’ve been thinking about the (wait for it) small differences you can make to reducing your energy use – something worth exploring whatever happens to prices.

I must confess to never having particularly thought about the usage of domestic appliances but the differences depending on how you cook are striking. A survey by Utilita showed that the cost of running an electric cooker is £316 a year. By switching to a microwave (£30) or slow cooker (£60), you could be saving yourself hundreds of pounds in bills. To give one specific example, baking a potato in the oven costs 27p: in the microwave it’s just 3p.

It’s what I call the Buck’s Fizz approach to the energy crisis: you’ve either got to speed cooking up, or you’ve got to slow it down. Older readers may remember my column from a couple of weeks ago about the benefits of going slow, so it may not surprise you to know that I took my own advice and bought a basic slow cooker: at under £30, it was cheaper than the cheapest microwave I could find.

Slow cooking has its origins in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius. Back in the 19th century, Jewish families getting ready for the Sabbath would prepare a stew before Friday nightfall, taking them to the town’s bakeries and leaving them in the slowly-cooling ovens. In the twentieth century, the inventor Irving Nachumsohn built on this tradition to develop his Crock Pot. Sales of his slow cooker were originally, well, slow, but took off in the early 1970s.

The slow cooker as a concept appeals to my limited culinary skills: you bung a load of meat and stock in, leave it for six hours and voila! A batch of tasty meals, complete with minimal washing up. Now that’s what I call saving energy all round.