The freedom – and lower costs – that gas brings only heightens the importance of keeping an eye on what happens to our neighbouring countries. Because we might hit a supply crisis faster than you can say ‘gas cliff’. I think my first memory of gas is when my family and I moved from Cape Town to Joburg in a previous millennium.
It was 1985, and after six months in a rented house in Orange Grove (where I was often sent to fetch the newspaper… and would read it on the way back – see how that ended) we moved into a house in what I think might now be called “Old Joburg”. It came with a connection to the municipal gas supply, something I didn’t know existed before that. It was quite fun in a way – there was a gas stove and gas geysers which made all sorts of interesting noises when you tried to have a hot shower.
Considering that we moved in in the middle of a (freezing!) Highveld winter, it took us a while to manage the taps. But my parents did the financially responsible thing at the time: convert from gas to electricity. This is not a decision anyone would take now.
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Instead, over time, gas has become so much cheaper than electricity. In our current home we have one of those stoves that has an electric oven and a gas hob. And it was one of the most liberating things in the world to be able to wake up in the morning, notice with an unsurprised grunt that the power was off, and still switch on a kettle.
The freedom gas brings goes way beyond the house. When we go camping we can use a small gas canister to make coffee in the mornings, cook porridge for breakfast and braai marshmallows at night (if I’ve done something catastrophic to the braai fire again). The first is that Jamie Oliver must be the most irritating person ever, in the entirety of human history, to have ever been in one.
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