Cooking on Gas

I have had an unexpectedly action-filled day.

It was meant to be full of making pastry and some new curtains for the camper van, until my phone rang and it was a man about whom I had completely forgotten, telling me that he was on his way round, with his apprentice, to fit our new smart meters to the gas and electricity.

I was actually quite excited about this. I like the idea of being able to see at a glance how much electricity the children are consuming with their use of Playstation and YouTube and telephone chargers and all the other adolescent accessories that appear to be necessary for an untroubled metamorphosis into a balanced adult in the twenty first century.

By the time the gas men arrived I was on my own apart from my half of the dogs. Mark had taken his dog up to the farm, and Number Two Daughter had disappeared off on some activity of her own. I decided to postpone the start of pastry manufacture or sewing machine usage on the expectation that both the gas and electricity would be switched off for the rest of the morning whilst everything got changed about, and was busy pegging the washing in the garden when they turned up.

For some reason the gas man and his apprentice each came in their own van, and were grumpy about the parking facilities provided at the back of our house, which are a bit limited. Then they came in and unloaded all their tools, which was slowed down a bit by the dog not liking them one bit and barking his head off, and then they checked for a mobile phone signal, which you need to have a smart meter, and which has always been our sticking point in the past. This time they found one, to my pleased surprise, and that was when things started to go terribly, terribly wrong.

The gas man looked at my cooker, which is a large affair with two ovens and a hob and a large glass lid.

He asked me if the gas rings went off when I closed the lid.

Of course I had no idea, because I had never closed it, except to stop plaster dust getting in it when Mark redid the ceiling once, and even then it had not occurred to me to try and shut it whilst the gas was lit, so I explained that I supposed so but was ignorant.

He said that we ought to find out.

This was an absolute nuisance, because it meant taking down the pan rack and all the pans first. They hang over the top of the cooker and were in the way of closing the lid.

I took them all down. Then I cleared everything off the top of the cooker. It took ages.

The man lit a gas ring and pulled the lid closed. Then he opened it again quickly because the ring stayed lit.

He said that it ought to go out, and that the valve which closed it must be full of grease and dirt because of my slovenly housewifery.

I was reasonably indifferent to this since I had never closed the lid.

He became very self righteous then.

I mean really self righteous.

He said that he was not going to fit me a smart meter at all. Instead he was going to cut the gas off because I was running an unsafe gas appliance which was unfit for use.

It took me a while to take in what he was saying. Once I worked it out I was astonished, and very cross. We need our gas cooker very much.

I said that the lid had never been closed and so it didn’t matter, and he had only come to fit a new meter anyway, so would he please just get on with it?

He said that my cooker had an Inoperable Safety Feature and therefore the appliance was dangerous and I must not be allowed to have gas to it.

I said that anybody stupid enough to close the lid with the rings lit deserved to be removed from the gene pool anyway.

The dog got upset and barked at him a lot.

He said that the Safety Feature was not just for my benefit but it existed and so I needed it. I said that ropes and harnesses existed as well but I didn’t need those, and kicked the dog to try and make it shut up. He said that there was no value in arguing for my right to own dangerous gas appliances and put the whole world in peril, and so I said I would just unscrew the lid and take it off. He said that I could not do this because he knew that it had been there. I said that it did not need a Safety Feature to stop the lid cracking if there was no lid, and he said that this was not the point and he was going to cut the gas off.

I told him that I was going to phone my husband, and dashed upstairs whilst the dog growled furiously at the horrible gas man who had upset me, and gasped down the phone that something dreadful was happening and he had got to come home straight away.

At this point the gas man stopped being self righteous and decided to leave, presumably in case Mark turned out to be seventeen feet tall with an anger management problem. He left in such a hurry he forgot his little signal checking device, which I still have, although I can’t think of anything yet that it might come in handy for.

Mark came home anyway, because I was so upset, and was very cross about the gas man. He pulled the cooker apart and said that the valve was jammed and needed replacing, probably due to their sooty gas, and not greasy at all, and when the doorbell rang I made him go and answer it in case it was the horrible gas man wanting his phone thing back, but it wasn’t.

It was another man from the gas board who had been told that there was an urgent gas emergency at our house, caused by a dangerous gas appliance, and he had come to cut our gas off.

I was very glad that Mark was there, because he didn’t seem to want to cry or scream at all, and just had quite a sensible conversation with the new gas man, who was round and smiley and cheerful, and who laughed when he found out what had happened and said that it was perfectly all right to take the lid off the cooker and then it would not be dangerous and need the gas cutting off any more.

Mark unscrewed the lid, and then they put the cooker back, and the gas man checked something at the meter and said that there was nothing wrong with our gas at all and not to worry, and went away.

Mark made some coffee, which he could do because we still had gas, and I was shaken and upset because of such a near miss with disaster, so Mark stayed until I felt recovered and then hoovered up the cooker-moving mess for me before he went back to the farm.

I was very glad that I had got Mark and the dog to look after me.

It is thanks to them that we are still cooking on gas.