Dammit, someone has finally taken responsibility for providing my house with gas. I got a bill from London Electricity today. Well, of course, that makes sense. If British Gas are doing my electricity, then obviously London Electricity are providing my gas. I think the previous owners of my house had a keen sense of irony. I can imagine them pulling wry faces each time an amenities bill arrived and saying "Aaaah, it is a bill from British Gas.... for our electricity!!!" and both laughing heartily to one another. Perhaps their water was supplied by the local fire brigade.
How did their world get so turned upside-down? What made them so jaded that they had to get their kicks this way? I could understand if one company was providing both services, there would be savings to be made, but why be so blatantly contrary?
I'm even beginning to wonder if the previous occupants supplied some kind of free box service for the local community. It would explain a lot of the strange looks I've been getting from my neighbours and the cries of "Box Hoarder" that wake me in the middle of the night.
I don't know why it's taken London Electricity so long to acknowledge that they've been providing my gas (although I moved in in June, I have owned the property since March). Possibly they were ashamed by the paradox of supplying me with gas,but not with the electricity that made them famous. I wonder if they've been secretly keeping quiet (and telling Transco to pretend that I have no known gas supplier) so that I would go gas-crazy and use as much gas as I could, thinking it was costing me nothing, only then to be ambushed by an enormous bill (with the added kick in the face of the irony of who had been supplying me with gas all along). They hoped that I was eating gas and drinking gas, bathing in gas, filling rooms full of gas to use at a later date in case I got found out, flying around London in a giant gas-powered Zeppelin (converted to natural gas somehow) which I filled daily from my free supply and from which I would distribute clouds of gas to the people of London below me, shouting "It's free! All quite free!"
They would only be partly right.
I never bathed in it.
Alternatively someone from London Electricity has been reading this diary and has realised that I was getting free gas and that no-one else was charging me, so they might as well cash in. You splitter!
I had to ring London Electricity and inform them that I'd decided to get my gas supplied by British Gas. I tried to break it gently to the man I spoke to, but I could tell he was upset. Though I know in his heart he saw the natural order of things has been restored. He saw that it was right, but it still hurt.
It still hurt.
