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Electricity.
May. 18th, 2013 04:34 pmThe house I have been living in for the last week in the far north of Britain, as far as you can go, has an electric cooker.
I haven't used an electric cooker for many years. I understand why this house has one - there is no gas supply in the island (ironic since it is surrounded by the gas fields of the North Sea); electricity cables cross over from the neighbouring island, and thence to the main island of the archipelago, and there are a lot of rotors churning out wind power, too.
My mother had a fear of gas, stemming, I think, from the war and accidents with gas. In her youth, gas was made from coal - coal gas - which had smelt bad and was stored in large tanks - telescopic gasometers, the skeletons of which can be seen in many towns and cities. Every so often these would blow up. Or the cookers would blow up. And people would put their heads in the ovens and asphixiate themselves, gas being heavier than air so it would push the air out.
My mother had a fear of gas all her life, and all the homes she had used only electricity. I grew up learning to cook on an electric cooker, slow to heat and slow to cool. You couldn't tell if the rings were on it not, unless they were very hot, in which case they would glow orange and angry. But it was easy to leave on and hard to clean.
And hard to control.
Even as a schoolboy, the use of electricity didn't make a lot of sense to me. To take one form of energy and transform it to another didn't seem right - power stations (and any type of transformer - particularly the internal combustion engine) are inefficient. Using electricity as a source of energy, derived from coal (mostly back then) or gas (natural gas, odour-free, less toxic, and not derived from coal but initially as a by-product of oil production, from the 1970s), meant losing energy when you could have had all the power of the original, seemed wasteful.
But my mother - and her parents, whom she may have caught this from - had the gas removed from the houses she lived in. And she really didn't like gas at all. Perhaps because electricity was advertised as the fuel of the future. "The white heat of technology."
Whereas I have never liked electric cookers.
(My mother also thought electricity sockets had to be switched off if nothing was plugged into them, to stop the electricity leaking out. But I never knew if she were serious or not.)
I haven't used an electric cooker for many years. I understand why this house has one - there is no gas supply in the island (ironic since it is surrounded by the gas fields of the North Sea); electricity cables cross over from the neighbouring island, and thence to the main island of the archipelago, and there are a lot of rotors churning out wind power, too.
My mother had a fear of gas, stemming, I think, from the war and accidents with gas. In her youth, gas was made from coal - coal gas - which had smelt bad and was stored in large tanks - telescopic gasometers, the skeletons of which can be seen in many towns and cities. Every so often these would blow up. Or the cookers would blow up. And people would put their heads in the ovens and asphixiate themselves, gas being heavier than air so it would push the air out.
My mother had a fear of gas all her life, and all the homes she had used only electricity. I grew up learning to cook on an electric cooker, slow to heat and slow to cool. You couldn't tell if the rings were on it not, unless they were very hot, in which case they would glow orange and angry. But it was easy to leave on and hard to clean.
And hard to control.
Even as a schoolboy, the use of electricity didn't make a lot of sense to me. To take one form of energy and transform it to another didn't seem right - power stations (and any type of transformer - particularly the internal combustion engine) are inefficient. Using electricity as a source of energy, derived from coal (mostly back then) or gas (natural gas, odour-free, less toxic, and not derived from coal but initially as a by-product of oil production, from the 1970s), meant losing energy when you could have had all the power of the original, seemed wasteful.
But my mother - and her parents, whom she may have caught this from - had the gas removed from the houses she lived in. And she really didn't like gas at all. Perhaps because electricity was advertised as the fuel of the future. "The white heat of technology."
Whereas I have never liked electric cookers.
(My mother also thought electricity sockets had to be switched off if nothing was plugged into them, to stop the electricity leaking out. But I never knew if she were serious or not.)