found a room in a shared house where there were three tenants (including myself) and the landlord, who lived in. The landlord was Mediterranean (I’m not sure from where) and the other two tenants were both Greek. We each had our own room and shared a kitchen, dining room and bathroom, all much as standard. However, the house was completely, and I mean completely, covered in cheap lino – the hallways, dining room, kitchen, bathroom – even our bedrooms! This, along with the universal use of woodchip wallpaper on every single wall, gave the house a really cheap and chilly atmosphere. I guess if you were an estate agent you would call the place Spartan, as opposed to what most people would call it, which would be institutional.
The piece de resistance though, were the gas fires. Each bedroom was fitted with its own gas fire – and gas meter. We all had old style gas fires in the fireplaces, and near to them, at the side of the old chimney breasts, were individual gas meters that took 50 pence pieces, and those meters ate 50 pence pieces like they were going out of style.
I became friendly with one of the Greek tenants who was clearly politically aware, and he was keen to tell me all about recent Greek History and the suppression of free speech and the ‘Z’ movement.
One day he came to me and said: ‘Chris, I think that the landlord is charging us too much for gas, so it’s costing us much more than it should to heat our rooms. I’ve asked around and apparently there’s a maximum that landlords are allowed to charge their tenants for gas, and I’m pretty sure we’re way over that limit.’ He then showed me a little indicator on our meters that showed how much we were being charged for gas. It clearly showed that the meters were set to maximum, meaning that we were paying the maximum possible for our gas. He then asked if I could contact the gas board about this, as his English wasn’t too good.
I was stunned. I remember thinking ‘Hang on, I’m the English guy here. It should be me showing him that we were paying too much for gas, not the other way round.’ A lesson learnt in never underestimating others, or overestimating yourself. I wrote to the only supplier of gas at the time, British Gas, and asked for clarification.
Note that there was no such thing as the internet through which I could contact the gas board, and the only other alternative apart from writing a letter, was to ring them. Now you also need to realise that back in those days your only access to a phone was via a public call box, and not only that, but any phone calls made in the morning (before 1.00am) were charged at a much higher rate than those made in the afternoon, so if you did need to use the phone, then you had to try and wait until after 1.00pm, which was a total pain. At the time I thought that it would be too expensive and too complicated to try and ring the gas board, so contacting them by letter was the only viable option, and so that is what I did.
The following weekend I was away, back home in Oxford, when a letter arrived for me on the Saturday, clearly marked British Gas on the envelope, and was left, as was the custom, on the hall table, ready for me to collect on my return. Now, according to my Greek friend, the letter mysteriously disappeared from the hall table later on in the day, reappearing a few hours later. Suspicious!
When I returned on the Sunday evening, as soon as I opened the front door, and before I could even take a step down the hallway, the landlord suddenly appeared from his room, which was the old living room, next to the front door, and greeted me in a rather overly effusively and friendly manner. He said: ‘Chris, my friend, I have just discovered that I have accidentally been charging you and the other tenants too much for your gas! I did not realise! I have therefore re-set all the gas meters in the house to where they should be, so from now on your gas will be cheaper! Not only that, but I am refunding you all £5 each to make up for any overpayment you may have already made. Good news, yes?’ I replied that it was indeed good news and collected my mail – the letter from the gas board - and went up to my room to read it.
As I suspected, when I opened the letter it explained that landlords were allowed to re-sell gas to their tenants at a slightly higher tariff than standard, but that there was a legal limit on how much more they could resell the gas for. I knew from my previous examination of the meter that he had been charging us way over the maximum limit allowed. The slimy get had clearly taken the letter from the gas board, addressed to me, steamed it open, read it, and then re-sealed it and put it back on the hall table! Not only that but when I re-checked my gas meter, he had indeed re-set the meters, but only adjusted them as little as possible, so he was still charging us the absolute maximum for gas that he could legally get away with. I also conservatively estimate that he owed us all at least £20 each for the excess money we’d all had to shove in our meters since we moved in, but he repaid us just £5 each. Cheeky blighter.
The lino house also gave me my first real taste of having to cook for myself - and I didn’t have the faintest idea! For a start this was very much in the days before any form of cookery/home economics/food and nutrition courses were on the radar in any boys’ school such as the one I attended and I was never even taught the rudiments of cookery, let alone anything else. Similarly, when I was brought up, ours was a very traditional home, and cooking was classed very much as woman’s work, and the kitchen was a woman’s space. Pete and I therefore almost never even entered the Kitchen, let alone did any cooking, and hence my knowledge of the culinary arts was virtually zero.
Culinary Chaos
Meals in my new lino house therefore consisted of such culinary delights as beans on toast, fish fingers, sausages, fried eggs, canned soup and a variety of packet and ready-to-cook meals (all of which were totally inedible). Note that the vast majority of my meals involved frying something, as frying was pretty simple (I don’t think I actually ever even opened the oven door; that was just a bridge too far), and whilst microwave ovens had just begun to appear in homes around the country by this point, they were still very much new technology that could only be found in some of the wealthier or more modern homes – and certainly not in my family home in Oxford or in any house I ever lived in as a student!
Because I was frying most things I bought some lard in a plastic tub, and used this for frying, as I’d seen my mum do. After the frying was finished, I would then pour the fat from the frying pan back into the tub of lard, again as I’d seen my mother do. I’ve no idea why mum ever did this, but in my case it was about the only thing I knew about cookery, and it saved me money. However, one day I realised that the boiling fat I was pouring back into the plastic tub, had actually melted and ruptured the walls of the tub, and horrible, hot, greasy lard was oozing everywhere! That put an end to my attempts at saving money by re-using lard, or using lard at all (thank heavens!)
I also bought a selection of ready meals in tins or packets or whatever, and I found them all to be absolutely disgusting and inedible, without exception. They seemed so convenient and easy, but the promise they offered of delicious meals that were easy to make, was illusory. One of the worst incidents I had as part of my great culinary exploration was with a Fray Bentos meat and potatoe pie. These came in saucer shaped tins (and still do I believe) and all you had to do was to pierce the lid in a few places and then put it on top of a saucepan full of water and steam it for about half-an-hour or so until cooked. Simple. However, one day I tried this on a seemingly delicious steak and kidney pie that I’d bought - but forgot to pierce the lid of the tin first! I left the pie steaming over a pan of boiling water and left it for a while. When I came back into the kitchen the once saucer shaped tin was by now almost completely round! Without any holes in the lid, there was nowhere for the heat and steam inside the tin to escape, and pressure had built up inside, forcing the tin into a spherical shape. Oh, dear, what to do about it?
The obvious course of action would have been to allow the tin to cool and then throw the whole thing away, but this was far too obvious and sensible an option. I decided to open the tin and see if the pie inside was still edible. I found the can opener and after quite a bit of a struggle, due to the deformity of the tin, I finally managed to get the can opener onto
