I was just a bit taller than a gas stove when I first learnt how to light one. It smelled like rotting vegetables, sulphur and fear as I nervously struck a match after turning the knob to let the hob exhale from its gas-cylinder lung.

That’s the way it was manually lit back then, not with the safer electric igniter, but with a naked flame on a matchstick held by a child to combustible gas. To avoid wasting a single matchstick, I was also taught to light it with a flame borrowed from a lit burner with a twist of old newspaper.