The Gas Man Cometh

By ancient custom it has been decreed throughout the land that those persons who are domiciled in buildings supplied with gas burning equipment should have such equipment annually inspected and serviced so that the said equipment and appliances shall not emit noxious and poisonous fumes nor explode inopportunely nor in any way cause injury to any persons who shall from time to time find themselves having lawful or unlawful cause to be present upon the same premises at the same time as the gas burning equipment and appliances. Failure to adhere to this custom hath been by long tradition punished by slow death by poisoning or else by spectacular explosion ….

Here followeth a journal writte dayley with the frefh memorief of a houfewyfe of gude repute and fincere motyvef to reckord all that enfued upon thif dreddful tale of woef.

Monday – The Writing’s on His Shorts

‘Twas on a Monday morning that the gas man came to call …. And thereby hangs a tale or two, if not also that ancient bit of comic doggerel set to music. Trouble is there now seems a danger that the tragedy of that song is in danger of coming true.

The nice young gas-fitter has been and gone and I have no gas at all. My gas fire is a mere fireplace ornament. My gas stove is just a handy cupboard for storing frying pans. My water heater is a merely a daft white powder-coated steel box on the kitchen wall. All my gas-fired domestic appliances are in a state of disconnection and all because of a little black ring of some rubbery, fibrous material that the earnest young man extracted from the joint between the service main and the meter.

“I’m afraid this is knackered,” he said with a professionally polished frown. His neat brown eyebrows puckered quizzically as he narrated this devastating bit of intelligence … mostly because he was, as yet, the sole privy to the additional fact that without the sealing ring the gas could not be reconnected.

“We don’t carry these,” he continued, helpfully twisting the miserable black object between his clean and well-groomed fingers, (whatever happened to grubby-mitted engineers? Men with calloused palms and crack-skinned knuckles deeply ingrained with the greasy black residue of their trade seem to be a thing of the past. These days engineers don rubber gloves before opening their toolboxes; I would not be surprised if one day soon I see a boxful of screwdrivers, wrenches and pliers all neatly packaged in autoclaved wrappers.)

I must admit that I was sorely tempted to ask to ask him why, if he carried no spares, had he removed the damned thing in the first place. I restrained the impulse. Sarcasm has no place in the modern world and—according to the TV this morning—it can also shorten one’s life. That would never do.

It seems that mere service engineers, no matter how qualified and registered they are, may not actually connect customers’ homes to the gas supply. Disconnection is not forbidden, though quite why this is so is a mystery I feel reluctant to explore.

“I have blanked off the supply main,” said the engineer with the surgeon’s hands. He’s also wearing fcuk underpants, I couldn’t help noticing when I observed him with his head buried inside the meter cupboard and his trim backside angled skywards like a terrier with its head down a rabbit hole.

Now call me cynical if you like, but what the heck did he use to seal the blanking-off plug? Surely one of those would do the trick? No. Like the song says. It all makes work for the working man to do. Connections may only be performed by employees of Transco (the name of the company that owns the national gas supply infrastructure). They will be informed of the gas leak and will attend to rectify the situation within two hours.

Oh frabcious joy and other cynical sentiments. As soon as the supply is reinstated I will be able to call my new friend and he will return to complete his job of certifying my gas using equipment as safe and unlikely to explode, leak, or poison me or my cat as we sleep the sleep of innocents.

In the meantime all I want to do is to make a nice Irish Stew …. I’m just the same when I go out without my mobile phone; I start wanting to ring people I haven’t spoken to for ages. It’s the extreme form of having your nose start to itch three second after you have both hands Marigolded and immersed in something sticky, stinky or both.

Tuesday – I Don’t Like Mondays

I gave up yesterday. I lost the will to live and simply went along with life’s farce, taking each smack in the chops like a Bollywood Princess. Mister Transco put in his appearance within an hour and for a short while all seemed to be proceeding according to plan. For a start he voiced aloud his thought concerning service engineer boy not carrying the requisite fibre washer. I ventured the opinion that in a litigious world doing the obvious is a stratagem that leads only into legal quagmires of Byzantine complexity and the hands of Machiavellian characters … if you’re lucky! If you’re unlucky you’ll end up in jail. For a short while, then, Transco man and yours truly shared a brief moment of contemporary peevishness, you know the sort of shambolic, maudlin nostalgia that begins with: they don’t make them like that any more and ends with: whatever happened to white dog poo? Usually stopping briefly at those well known request stops: what became of Olde English flavour Spangles? And: I was beaten as a child and it never did me any harm and: of course, in my day we had to walk to school … rain or shine, through wind and snow.

Of course such a placid state of affairs was merely one of life’s plot subterfuges, designed to lull me into a false sense of optimism. I began to suspect that perhaps there was a problem when I realised that he was still clanking and tapping and generally messing about in the meter cupboard twenty minutes later. I asked if there was a problem. Silly me. Of course there’s a problem. The half century old pipe that carries gas from the meter to my bits and pieces is leaking. Not much but too much for safety. He leaves me disconnected. Transco do not service and repair customers’ installations; they stick to their own pipe-work and meters. Time to call back the service engineer. He’s back in minutes. It seems he has just completed another job in a nearby street. He has a whole other list of scheduled jobs to attend to but he can arrange for the job to be done “tomorrow” (meaning today: Tuesday). Can’t you fix it now? I ask. He looks troubled; a good sign, he doesn’t want to let me down. He calls his office and discovers that there is an engineer sitting around doing nothing except waiting for an emergency.

Which is how I managed to have four visits by three different gas men all on the same day. The final visit came at around 2pm and it soon became apparent that service boy #1 did not make a fully successful report as to the nature of the problem. I had to explain what needed doing. I fear I did not make much sense. I had another go. Ah! He got the idea. Excellent. Bit of a problem. Running a new pipe out to the gas fire in the sitting room is going to be time consuming, messy (and no doubt expensive … aghhhh!!!). He’ll have to come back to do that. Oh, good-oh! Thank God for global warming, is what I say. Several times this winter I have been forced to open all the doors and windows to let some heat out … electric storage heating is a royal pain in the arse. At least boy #4 reconnected my stove and water heater. He’s coming back tomorrow to rip up floors and drill holes in walls and so on.

Personally I blame Hitler for all this. If he hadn’t invaded Poland then UK plc wouldn’t have ended up so bankrupt in the 1950s that builders were forced to use steel pipes for gas because imported copper was too expensive … or maybe I am just being silly again by naively imagining that people actually stop to consider the long term viability of their choice of building materials.

Wednesday – Waiting on Mad Hat Droppers

There’s something really quite desperate about waiting in all day for a tradesman to visit. The hours pass in a ghastly but stately kind of predictableness that belies the theoretical passivity of the supposed activity, if a suspension of activity by self-imposed incarceration can be described so positively. The first stage is the one where you leap out of bed and begin a frantic, if rather pointless—not to mention belated—spring clean, designed to confer upon the house some evidence that the residents are, in fact civilized beings who use the bath tub for bathing rather than for the storage of coal … or the brewing of beer. The second stage begins a little later after you call the contact phone number to verify that your house is actually on the schedule. (I mean: ye gods! It’s 5 past 8, practically lunchtime and there’s no sign of your man!) The third stage is the longest and most aggravating. This is the phase during which you dumbly seek to rationalize a working man’s schedule and by means of constant clock watching and internal dialogues concerning every conceivable aspect of a tradesman’s milieu in the vain hope of finding a window of opportunity to slip out for a few minutes … maybe to obtain urgently needed replenishments for my store cupboards (I am, lest you forget, the most overstocked person I know. Two years ago during a Mariana Trenchantly deep withdrawal from reality I subsisted for almost 6 weeks on a diet of basmati rice made savoury and nutritiously flavoursome with Marmite and butter, all supplied from my store of comestible supplies because a combination of agoraphobia, self-loathing and lethargy had lead me into the sort of insolvency that is as annoying difficult to mitigate—in terms of credit worthiness—as it is embarrassingly easy both to avoid in the first place as well as for its pettiness of proportion.)

The third stage of waiting for a house-call commences abruptly at the time in the afternoon when you, quite reasonably, decide that no sensible person would expect to complete the task in what hours remain in the day. For me that time was when Countdown began on the TV. The irony of this was lost on me at the time. The sadder truth is that daytime TV is the most appalling development of human disingenuity [Sic serendipitously apt] but at 3:30 the evergreen king of quizzes comes on and for a while one can stretch a brain cell or two (I beat both contestants today by solving the final conundrum on sight … but that’s not part of this narrative … yet).

At half past three, I concluded, the chances of being able to complete the job of reconnecting my gas fire before bad light and anti-social hours make employment too expensive for employers were vanishing into the realms of the reciprocally infinite. Ha-bloody-ha! I have been “Neighbourhood Watching” all flaming day. I have observed a suspiciously shady character ringing doorbells of houses whose occupants are out (he left, but I have a description and his car’s number.) I’ve seen a truck with a Hi-Ab deliver a couple of tons of gravel, neatly packaged in two non-returnable sacks—for the convenience of the Hi-Ab to grab for easy off-loading—to a neighbour who appeared, paid with cash, and who then gaily slashed the bags with a shovel to release his precious limestone chips which he then raked out over his driveway. An elderly couple were also seen to depart in a mini-bus that arrived to collect them. I don’t know if this a regular event … maybe I should keep a regular watch … what am I saying.

At four o’clock I was crudely distracted from Countdown’s tea-time teaser by a knock at the door! The gas man hath cometh … again … at last!

My reader will be immensely—if cynically minded—relieved to be appraised that the gas man hath no clear and well-defined idea concerning what he is here to do. I explain. He looks perplexed. I feel apoplexed. He has a clipboard-folder, the sort you can get in Staples, the sort you get when you enrol on a course—or take a job—that involves lots of loose papers that need filling in. He opens his folder to show me that he has been led to expect, by an uncaring dispatcher and issuer of work-sheets, a simple job involving the connection of a gas fire. I show him the fire and then I show where the gas is. They are separated by a number of walls, all of them made of stout English bricks, most of them being at least 12 imperial inches thick. Crudity alert. My visitor feels obliged to confess that his drilling equipment is deficient to the tune of several inches.

This is where it starts to get a little Faustian … or do I mean Flanders and Swannish?

Thanks to the miracle of cellular telephony he announces that he’ll call around to locate a fellow engineer in the vicinity who has a nice long one (I said it was going to get a little crude …). He tells me not to worry and returns to his van. From my bedroom window I can see him eating a sandwich … thanks to the miracle of Bluetooth technology I have no bloody idea if he is using his phone or not. Momentarily distracted in my simmering rage of abstraction, I solve the show-climactic Countdown Conundrum and it feels apt because my sort of intellectual greatness needs powerful emotional stimulation as fuel. I glanced at the conundrum—something like UNLOGSIDE it was— and I snarled, “delousing” before the countdown clock even started to tick … both studio contestants failed even to buzz within the 30 seconds. I felt a hollow sort of pleasure in my pointless triumph. What I wished for was release from the tyranny of tradesmen; solving that flaming anagram shows how mad I am. What really pissed me off at that moment was the irritating knowledge that Countdown is derived from a show named Des Chiffres et des Lettres … bloody cheese-eating surrender-monkeys! Can’t even manage to come up with a decent name for a quiz show!

The show is over and I take an opportunity to go make some tea. When I get back to my window, Deal Or No Deal is starting on the TV and the gas man’s van has gone! Ah well. He was probably too embarrassed to tell me in person. I suppose I should anticipate a phone call …. On the TV, Deal Or No Deal is shaping up to be entertaining. The contestant du jour is a fabulously camp man who goes by the name of Bunney I have lost the will to do much else, but Bunney is amusing me and I am, slightly to my chagrined and reluctant surprise, really wishing good will toward him. I am glad that I am seeing this show. I only catch it now and then and when I first saw Bunney a few weeks ago I was taken by his personality and hoped I’d be around to see his turn in the driving seat. It’s my mum’s fault that I started looking out for the show at all and as it hasn’t come up in phone natter since she was here over Christmas I decide to phone her to ask if she is also watching (and to find out if we share the same sympathy for Bunney). She is; she does. I have to curtail the call. The gas man hath cometh once more unto the breach betwixt my gas and the fire.

He has returned to let me know that he drove away to get a drink (presumably at the local convenience store a mere two minute walk way—and we wonder why CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere with bozos like that making free with the planet’s precious resources—and that he is waiting on the arrival of a colleague with a long drill. It is now half past four and even if gas man #5 appears, like, now! and both work together until seven—unlikely—it’ll be a miracle if the job can be finished today. Wisely I keep this surmise to myself. In the good olde days, before Nokia et al, I could’ve made him a cup of tea or a glass of lemonade while he phoned around. OK, he would’ve been using my phone but at least I could’ve eavesdropped on the ensuing conversations. (Planet Earth would also be one or two grams of CO2 lighter … but hey I’m not willing to be that picky at this stage.) Damned technology. We’d all be better off without it … well, except for those bits which are useful ….

There are no miracles in this age of reason. G-man number five appears at the three-quarter hour. He looks a little like the younger brother of g-man number one (remember him? Back in the good old days of Monday?) This one is so young he probably missed seeing the collapse of the WTC towers because he was in school at the time. What he does have is a long drill. They confer in muttered tones, using that dreadful vocabulary that is peculiar to the artisan professional. Words like slash, rip and chop. They’re designed to make a tender householder quake and fret concerning the consequential, necessary redecoration and cleaning up … their tools and hands are clean (and it goes without saying that all brick dust and detritus will be removed) but who gets to put back the wall paper?

The council of war concludes and they are of one mind. The job must be finished tomorrow. I’m not here tomorrow, I inform them. Damn my eyes for confounding their plans and fuck them for excluding me from their counsels and council. Their hasty reconvention is risible and pointless because I have the answer ready: Friday? Their gratitude is touching. Any time? They want to know.

Morning, I say, more inspired by insane mischief than by necessity. Of course, morning it is, they agree as gas man #4 confers with his office on the ubiquitous phone. Before they leave the new guy hangs around to drill out all the required holes. Oh! This’ll be no trouble they tell me. A mere bagatelle.

A short while later the newbie reappears in my hallway with a power tool equipped with an impressively long drill bit. It might just be my febrile imagination but it is possible that he seems a little more cocky with his big tool in his hands … sorry but I can’t help it. When they are finally ready to depart I feel sufficiently well acquainted to be so chummy as to offer to write to their boss with the intention of recommending that they all be supplied with a big drill rather to have to share. My suggestion is met with a silence which shatters the fragile camaraderie that has so recently flourished under my roof. I am informed that their tools are their own. The company’s largesse is limited to the supply of the van and of the amusing little red and black R2D2-ish vacuum cleaner with the comic eyes and the name Henry emblazoned upon its rotund side … yeah, well, those and the Staples clipboard folder (I think sullenly). Honestly! It’s bad enough that the firm is sending out its operatives with incomplete instructions but it seems altogether more reprehensible of them to send them out without the equipment to do the job (even though it—the company—hasn’t actually the foggiest idea what actual job it is sending its operatives out to do). Tomorrow is a day called Thursday. Apart from not being at home to receive gas men the day is entirely mine to think up ways of entertaining myself. Sadly I shall probably waste the better part of the day in worrying about the impending visit scheduled for Friday ….

I can’t wait.

Thursday - Send in the clowns.

It is half past eight at night. It’s dark and there is naff all worth watching on the four channels of TV that my TV aerial is capable of receiving. What is it with Thursday nights and the TV schedules? Thursdays are traditionally and most emphatically not the most notable night of the week for going out and sloshing red paint around in the fleshpots and watering holes of civilisation’s townships’ pubs, clubs and other dens of iniquity. I am possibly the most cynical person I know but surely it cannot be true that on the one night of the week when most people are at home with nothing on their minds but a heavy weekend of conspicuous consumption that the TV schedules are stuffed with the most appallingly pseudo-intellectual crap and other brain-deadening pap that even the most charisma-challenged Oxbridge clone is hard pressed to justify on any grounds other than the least appealing one; that one being that the transmitter was on and using electric power anyway so it seemed a shame to let the energy go to waste.

The pinnacle of Britland televisual entertainment of a Thursday night is the never less than suicidifacient Question Time, where a carefully balanced panel of imbecilic political has-beens respond to the most disingenuously contrived raft of questions—on the hot and simmering issues of the day—all posed by a studio audience which consists of members of the great British public, none of whom one is likely to meet in a checkout queue at Asda. No. The audience is chosen from that rarefied breed found only in closed-membership (read: invitation only) cliques around the arts campuses of universities, and—in this brave new world of rational multi-ethnicity—a carefully selected sample might also be drawn from those back-street fundamentalist theological clown-schools whose representatives wear their badges of faith not as a sign of zeal but as a challenge to other adherents exactly the same as themselves except that they wear a different clown costume.

I am not sure where it started but there exists today a strong undercurrent of antipathy towards circus clowns. Many people are openly and expressively willing to admit to a phobia of clowns. Maybe it began decades or centuries ago or maybe it started in earnest after Stephen King’s novel: It, which featured, amongst its horrors, a clown and—pre-Harry Potter—it was for several years, in the UK at least, the principal must-read novel for 9-13 year olds. Whatever the case, clowns are now firmly established in the collective psyche as scary beings. I can no longer endure to watch Question Time. If the sight of the panel doesn’t send me retching with fear and terror to cower behind the sofa, then I am apt to risk a serious stroke or some other catastrophic vascular accident as my rage at not being able to slap some self-satisfied prig around the face for having the brass neck to so casually speak for me without first asking my opinion or offering me the right to respond.

I can only be grateful that tomorrow is Friday and that this apology of a week is almost over. I woke on Monday with vigour and optimism that my diary was clear except for the trifling, but mostly pleasing, matter of being at home during the morning to receive a man who would carry out my annual gas safety check. At this stage of the proceedings I feel more inclined to attempt to overthrow the government with barrels of gunpowder and dastardly plot; failure in that enterprise would be an ennobling experience, if nothing else. The only bright spot in milieu is the newly cracked-open paperback at my bedside. The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton … damn, but it’s good!

Friday – My Dreamy Date

I think I’ve finally flipped. Last night I dreamed that one of my many gas man suitors had arrived to wake me from my slumbers. I must be getting old and past it because there was no eroticism. Not even a saucy glimpse of his branded underwear. No, this apparition of my id was intent only on waking me so that I could let him in, and yeah, I was wondering, too, even as I dreamed on frustrated and cross to be “woken” why he needed to be let in if he was already inside to wake me up to ask to be admitted.

Well stage one of the waiting is over. I even removed the unsightly splodges of congealed yellow goo from the hob—the result of some enthusiastic pan shaking during my ongoing attempts to make the perfect omelette for yesterday morning’s breakfast before I set off to my weekly IT class. I kind of hope now that the promised visit fails to occur. I feel one of my angry letters of complaint coming on ….

Later.

Miracles have occurred. Not only has the pipework been completed but I didn’t even have to explain the job to the man who came to do the job—he arrived at 12:15, which is not exactly morning by my reckoning what with it being post meridian and all, but hey! Anyway the guy is stood, standing there and what is more significant he’s the same fellow that I saw on Wednesday. Not the second of Wednesday’s men, the one with the extra-long drill, but nobody’s perfect. At least he knows exactly what the job entails. I leave him to his work and hide in my back room … after leaving him a nice fresh pot of tea and a 25 kilogram sack of sugar to help him maintain fluid levels and blood sugar during his labours.

He completes the job in only three hours. I can’t help wondering how many man hours were wasted in unnecessary and wasted journeys. I’m just glad I don’t have to foot the bill, that liability being the responsibility of the landlord. If I were a mere owner I wouldn’t bother with all this politically correct bullshit. I would just wait until I passed out from carbon monoxide or else found myself unexpectedly in the back yard with a smell of singed hair in my nostrils after trying to light the oven. I mean life is too short for such farcical attention to detail. At one point, I found him with a piece of tissue, tenderly polishing a newly soldered joint; I was just checking to see if he needed a tea refill or may a bacon sandwich, or perhaps—if he was feeling a touch avant garde—a little Beluga caviar on toasted fingers of homemade whole wheat soda bread. He felt moved to explain himself, the way men do when caught red-handed with a tissue in their hands. Apparently the gunk used to make sure the solder sticks to the copper tube is also responsible for long term copper corrosion if not carefully removed after the soldering is done. Yeah, mate. If you say so. Plumbers. You got to admire them: they’ve got more face than Mount Rushmore.