When I was a boy, we had a gas-light standard in the lane by our row of cottages, ideal for honing the climbing skills. It was right outside my uncle Sam's house. The lamp was a glass-paned enclosure with a gas mantle mounted on a cast iron post with a cross bar for a ladder. A pilot light burned continuously and it had a clockwork timer, wound every week by a Gas Works employee, a miserable old git on a rust bicycle as I remember, who stunk of Elliman's Embrocation [ ointment for rheumatics ].
Well, progress caught up with us and sometime in the fifties and without warning it got removed and replaced by a concrete monstrosity, c/w a yellow sodium lamp. But,they put the new standard outside my auntie Annie's house....
JHC! World War III erupted in the lane! Old uncle Sam, by then well into his seventies, had had the benefit of a 'free' bedside light for 45 years and now he had to buy candles! Auntie Annie had now got "his" free bedside light, [ as if she had schemed it all ], but she said she didn't want it as it made her look like she had jaundice! They both wrote furious letters to the town council and Winston Churchill [ and for all I know Harry Truman ], but it stayed firmly planted where it was.
I looked on Google Earth - we sold the house after Ma passed away - and fifty-odd years later, it's still there! Creepy!
Alan
