UK specific: Mussorgsky title and environmental impact Aga

[duckodeath]

This is for the same fic that takes place in London in January 2007. The first question the place matters, but the time doesn't. The second one is very time dependent

Comments

[lil_shepherd]

I didn't even know that it was known as 'Night on a Bald Mountain' in the States - I've always seen it 'Night on a Bare Mountain' at concerts and such. This is probably because in the UK we don't tend to use 'bald' for anything except 'something without hair or feathers or, occasionally, fluff'. So, a bald head or a bald cat (though we would generally use 'naked' for a Sphynx.)

We don't use it for 'treeless' or 'snowless' and would say 'bare rock' never 'bald rock' which is, I suppose, the context here.

We also don't use it meaning 'white' except when it's part of a proper name like, say 'Bald Eagle' (and I thought for a long time as a child that that had a featherless head like a vulture) - we wouldn't ever used 'bald-faced' for a horse with a very large white blaze - we would say 'white-faced'.

[sollersuk]

Full agreement.

Agas carry so much cultural baggage in terms of the social etc background of their users that green credentials are the least of it; the only family I knew who had one loved it because it kept so much of the house warm (a consideration even in the English summer) and so it was a net saving in fuel. "We've got a Rayburn" doesn't have the cachet of "We've got an Aga".

[sollersuk]

Oh, and re bald eagles: never mind in childhood, I was in my 50s before I realised that they didn't have featherless heads like vultures and have only just now discovered why they are called that.

[bookwormsarah]

I only discovered that Bald Eagles aren't bald when reading this thread!

[dorsetgirl]

The word from the cheap seats:

(1) I've never heard of "A Night on Bald/Bare Mountain", so I wouldn't notice either way.

a Brazilian rain forest every week

(2) As one who's never owned or thought of owning an Aga, I had no idea. I always thought Agas must be quite eco-friendly on the grounds that they were using up old bits of wood rather than fossil fuels or newly-chopped trees - I didn't know you could get gas ones. Obviously if you want the owner of said Aga to know these things, that's quite a different matter. Although I would say that to own an Aga says such a lot about the family's social and financial position that I certainly wouldn't expect them to be rushing to get rid of it if they did find out it wasn't eco-friendly. They might have been working and saving for years to get to a house where they could have one.

[inamac]

On Q1 it depends on whether your joke depends on a confusion of bald/hairless or bare/naked (as Lil Shepherd as said).

Q2. An Aga is a status/class symbol as much as a method of heating/cooking. In practice gas Agas are rarer than solid fuel ones because they are usually installed in places which don't have access to mains gas supplies so would have to be run on bottled gas - and they are expensive enough without adding unnecessary fuel costs. Where is this Aga? In a remote country house it wouldn't be gas-powered, in a city home the owner would be more interested in the status-symbol effect than green issues - and might well never use it, preferring restaurant or microwave food and a separate central heating system.

[janewilliams20]

1) I'd never heard of it being called "Bald" mountain, but then I had no idea it got used in "Fantasia", either. I've heard jokes about it having "bears" on it.
2) Agas can run on gas? I've only met ones that run on wood, and if my uncle's woodpile had been the size of a Brazilian rain forest, I think I'd have noticed.

[louisedennis]

Bought a house with an AGA in it in 2006. We were concerned about the efficiency in a nebulous way (wasting energy is bad both financially and environmentally). I don't recall seeing anything specific about environmental impact when we looked around but there was a fair bit of defensiveness about "value for money" in lots of the places I looked

[janewilliams20]

You have just described my aunt and uncle's household - building business, run from home, with lots of hearty eaters dropping in to be fed and dried out all day. The Aga was run on wood scraps from the carpentry side of the business, among other fuel sources.

[syntinen_laulu]

Whereas, in my parent's appallingly cold and damp house in the middle of a wood (on boulder clay, totally impermeable, puddles last for weeks), the Aga, plus an open wood fire that were kept going 24 hours a day from October to March, was the only thing that kept the house half-ways habitable. in addition, the steady temperature right next to the Aga was just right for brewing beer (my mother, like a medieval housewife, kept her household supplied with ale), the worktop nearby was handy for germinating tomato and other seedlings, and the washing got dry handing from the rail or sitting on top of the domes. That was worth £1 a day and then some, but you'd need that kind of lifestyle to get your money's worth from it.