Wednesday 19 December 2012

Channelling Adam


 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.