I may have the body of a mature woman but,
from time to time (quite frequently, unfortunately) I find myself with the
mind of an immature teenage boy. Let's call him Adam - absolutely
no resemblance to any actual Adam that I know. His sense of humour is
what you would expect, but it keeps me sane.
Mornings are not my favourite time of day,
particularly when I have to get up at 6.30 am to get ready for the day
job. So in order to break myself in gently, I listen to Radio 4. It
gets me used to the idea that people will be talking to me fairly soon, and I'm
going to have to concentrate. Trouble is, I'm not really concentrating yet, so only random words and phrases make it through to my brain.
The other morning, I was just getting into the shower when I suddenly
registered that the presenter was saying, "....so they're going
to set up the Office for Unconventional Gas". Who "they"
are I have no idea but, if you have to work in an office, that one's got to be
more interesting than most! That's when Adam kicked in, and I started
wondering, what counts as an unconventional gas? My first thought was
helium, but apparently there's quite a lot of that about, so at least the O UG
staff (even the acronym's funny!) won't be speaking in squeaky voices.
There is also far too much methane about to be unconventional, for which
I'm sure they will be very thankful. However, I believe you can get heavy
(or do I mean dense?) gasses, that would lurk around their ankles in a thick
white cloud. And I've driven through fog sometimes that doesn't start
until about five feet off the ground, but fog is a vapour - does that count as
a gas? I surely hope so, because they could have some of that round their
shoulders, then they wouldn't be able to see where they were going. Or
what their colleagues were doing. Unless they kept bending down.
Just when I was starting to think about test tubes
full of different coloured gasses, the radio presenter began to talk about
fracking. Now, I've more or less got my inner Adam under
control with that word, so I was listening to this bit as a responsible
grown-up with a concern for the environment. What I didn't realise
though, was that fracking isn't just a verb; it can be a singular
noun. Yep, that's right. You can have one frack, and the earth
moves in Birmingham (allegedly). Adam was back with a vengeance,
and I couldn't clean my teeth for giggling.
