If you don’t know who Hester is (or was – she’s probably dead by now, forty years later), she was an Elderette in our congregation way back when. She had a gift for coming out with things that were simultaneously breath-takingly stupid, and utterly hilarious.
Stir in a generous measure of Theocratic self-righteousness and you have someone who was wonderfully quotable and very memorable.
I post these stories as they come back to me.
Anyway, to get up to speed, see
This story concerns North Sea Gas. Back in the period 1970-71 the whole of Southern England was converting over from Town Gas to the newly discovered and piped-in North Sea Gas. Every home that had a gas cooker or heating appliance had to be converted in order to burn the new gas. Conversion only took half-an-hour or so,but it was a major national operation as, street-by-street, houses were converted and connected up to the new supply.
It obviously caused a great deal of comment and debate in T.V. news and current affairs shows. As ever, with an operation like this, there were concerns over safety. Was the new gas as safe as the old? Was there anything to beware of?
One particular concern was the smell of the new gas. The smell was apparently similar to Town gas, but much less pungent. It had a much fainter odour. The danger was that, in the case of a leak, much more of the highly-combustible gas could be released into a room before anyone became aware by means of the smell. Householders were advised to be more vigilant.
Somehow, after the book study one evening, the conversation got around to this subject. Someone mentioned that the new gas was more dangerous because of the lack of smell.
Hester knew all about it:
“Nothing to worry about!” she said. She’d been reading all about it, it seems, and was fully up-to-date.
“They know it’s got less of a smell, so they put a noise into it!”
“A noise?” one or two puzzled looks.
“Yes, the scientists put a noise into the gas. In the Gasworks. That way you can hear a leak if you’ve got one. It’s all quite safe.”
I was as intrigued as anyone at what it was that Hester might have heard.
“Do you mean it’s under higher pressure or something, so, when it leaks, it hisses that much louder?” I asked .
Or I thought that maybe she’d read maybe that the design of the gas jets burning the new gas was such that unburnt gas coming out was more turbulent and noisier and so hissed louder. Or something.
But no. She stuck to her guns.
“Where they make it – in the gasworks – they put a noise in it. It’s a safety feature.”
So, as ever, we all came away educated by Hester.
In the café next day, me and Tom and the guys just marvelled at the fact that someone could have such a total lack of grasp of the physics of the world she lived in, that she could believe you could put a noise into gas. In the gasworks.
Later that day, one of the pioneer group thought up this brilliant game where you went out of the room, and shouted into a jamjar, instantly trapping the lid back on. Then you came back in, handed the jar to someone else, and he had to lift the lid and see if he could hear what you had shouted. We counted the time. Happy days.
Duncan .
p.s. I’ve remembered another one, I might post that later today.