It is not, I admit, a terribly exciting photo. And yet, it is, to me—that’s a full cylinder there on the left.
For various reasons, I’ve not yet had to purchase a gas cylinder since moving here. The reasons are that, for a while, I was loaded with them. It didn’t used to be that way; there was a time, years ago now, when LPG bottles were often hard to find. Sometimes, there were full-on shortages that lasted for months. So you always had spares. And during the worst of the shortages, one got by mostly via connections. Someone you knew knew someone you could buy one from.
After your first-time gas bottle purchase, you’re basically just paying for refills from there on out, and should that company’s bottles not be available when you need them, for a nominal fee you can easily swap your bottle for one from a different company—easy peasy.
But during those long-term shortages, the usual rules no longer applied. If an available bottle was, say Everest Gas, and you didn’t have an empty so named, you had to buy the whole cylinder, like, from scratch.
**
So that’s how I ended up some years ago with five gas cylinders, a number I decided I didn’t want or need to move to this apartment with. One, I left behind in my previous dwelling along with the accompanying hot water shower system; this place has solar so I wouldn’t need it, and it was a sort of payment for the damage my felines had done to the window screens there. It seemed a fair exchange.
Another empty was purchased by my current landlord when I moved in here; he said he knew someone who wanted one.
So I now have three, and when I moved here one was sealed and the other two were partially used, amount unknown, but they must have been pretty full, because they lasted and lasted. My neighbours also went out of the country for a few months and were apprehensive to leave an opened cylinder that long and kindly gave it to me. So I used that one up, too. On July 11, 2023, though, I opened my final bottle.
You should really replace one of your empties, I thought to myself, before proceeding to completely forget about it. In fact, until I checked the dates just now I would have wrongly said it was just two or three months ago that I’d dragged it in and hooked it up to the stove.
**
Two weeks ago I was making marmalade with batch of local local suntala, a citrus fruit very like but not exactly the same as a tangerine. Part way through the necessary hours of boiling, I began to wonder just how much was left in that cylinder. For the first time in ages, I wouldn’t have anything to swap it out it with if it ran empty just as the jam reached setting point.
Of course, there haven’t been shortages for years now, but in my old neighbourhood I knew all the dealers, which ones delivered, and just as often picked it up myself on the scooter. Here, aside for a small dealer near the mouth of the alley that I’d already popped in on and learned carried none of the brands I have, I was clueless.
The solution, when it came, was rather anticlimactic. I went down to my eminently organized neighbour—the same one who’d left me her partially-full bottle—and asked her where she got her gas from.
“The same guy who delivers for the whole neighbourhood. Shall I send you his number, or do you want me to call him for you?”
She asked what company’s bottles I had and then called and asked him which they carried. Of my two empties—Everest Gas and Sai Baba—they had the latter, and for a most reasonable delivery charge it arrived the same evening. It’s one of those cases of if I’d known something would be that easy, I’d have done it a long time ago.
The marmalade turned out unusually well, with a lovely set which I cannot explain—oh the mysteries of fluctuating pectin levels in fresh fruit—and now that I don’t need to worry about running out of gas mid-boil, I should probably make another batch…