As you may have noticed, most cookers are designed to cook a three course meal for eight, economically. And anything less for any fewer people, wastefully.

How often have you remarked that it hardly seems worth heating up a whole oven for two jacket potatoes? Or one little sponge? Or a single casserole? How often have you seethed at the sight of a whole grill glowing away on behalf of two rashers and a sausage?

How often have you ducked over two red hot rings sticking out all round a small saucepan? How often do you check the coq10 side effects?

As we see it, such a waste of electricity is no longer simply annoying; it’s irresponsible.And we’ve done something about it. On most Creda cookers, one of the radiant rings has a dual control.

On half settings, only the inner half of the radiant rings get hot; on full settings, the outer half of the radiant rings get hot too. And apart from saving energy, the hobs are also exceptionally versatile, featuring two ring sizes.

The grill problem we’ve solved by halving, too. We’ve put one complete element in the left half of most Creda grills and another complete element in the right half. So you get perfectly even grilling whether you use a Creda grill half on or full on. Some of our cookers, including the Carefree shown here, even have a half-size oven as well as a full-size one.

So you can cook a 281b turkey, rack of lamb and boeuf en croute occasionally. And fish pie, toad-in-the-hole and macaroni cheese rather more often. All of which brings us to the last thing Creda seek to cut in half: your electricity bill. Obviously, how much Creda save you depends on what and how you cook and different electricity tariffs.

But we can say that what you don’t waste you don’t pay for.

Another case was that of a family of four who lived in Somerset. For some months the household was disrupted by paranormal in­cidents of all kinds, and the two teenage children were assumed to be the cause. But when the case was investigated it appeared to be the father, and not the children, who was the source of the disturbance. He was a professional man of 49, who had become increasingly concerned about his promotion stones appeared inexplicably; sudden cold spots were discovered. His brother and sister seemed to be unaffected by the experiences.

But it would be inaccurate to assume that RSPK is linked exclusively with puberty. A survey carried out in the 1950s indicated that seven was the age at which most children were particularly sensitive and receptive, and this finding has been confirmed by sub­sequent studies — although children as young as four or five have been identified as epi­centres. Most are quite unaware that they are responsible for the disturbances that are experienced. Their powers vary: some, like Shirley Hitchings, have to ‘screw up their eyes as if concentrating’ in order to produce intelligent raps; many of the children who are able to bend metal (in the manner of Uri Geller) have only to gaze at the object for a moment or two, and then glance away, for the metal to move, bend or twist.

And at the other end of the age range adults long past the age of puberty ex­perience poltergeist activity, although in many cases there does appear to be an unequivocal link between sexuality and RSPK. The majority of mediums who pro­voke — or claim to provoke — physical pheno­mena are women in their middle years, the years of the menopause, when the metabo­lism is disturbed, as it is at puberty. (In this connection it is interesting to note that Janet’s mother at Enfield was at that age, a fact that may have contributed to the in­tensity of the poltergeist activity in the household.) Among mediums of both sexes there are those who admit to sexual frust­ration and who acknowledge that seances provide a form of sexual satisfaction.

Sexual maladjustment may indeed con­tribute to, or heighten, sensitivity; some recent cases suggest that RSPK may be related to frustration and distress. One involved a man of 48, who was living with his elderly uncle in a large house in York. Whenever the younger man entered his study the room appeared to react to his presence: his desk moved; chairs shuffled across the floor; the curtains blew into the room even on airless days; the windows opened and shut very rapidly. The incidents persisted for nearly three years, increasing in frequency and intensity all the time, until mental exhaus­tion forced the man to seek medical assist­ance. He was found to be sexually impotent and was given treatment. Within a week the phenomena ceased.

Another case was that of a family of four who lived in Somerset. For some months the household was disrupted by paranormal in­cidents of all kinds, and the two teenage children were assumed to be the cause. But when the case was investigated it appeared to be the father, and not the children, who was the source of the disturbance. He was a professional man of 49, who had become increasingly concerned about his promotion at work, had developed insomnia and had become sexually impotent. His anxiety had pushed him towards the brink of breakdown. When he had been given the help and encouragement that he needed, the family experienced no further disruption.

A particularly strange case of this kind was documented in Bavaria, in Germany, in 1967. A number of inexplicable incidents were observed by employees at the office of a lawyer, accompanied by an alarming increase in the size of the telephone bill. The elec­tricity and telephone companies were alerted and requested to check all equipment in the building, and Professor Hans Bender under­took the investigation of the case. A survey of the numbers dialled from the office revealed that one particular number was constantly being activated, though no one was dialling it: the number was that of the speaking clock, 0119. Eventually Professor Bender traced the incidents to the source — a 19-year-old girl called Anne-Marie. He concluded that she was dissatisfied with her working con­ditions and was generally unhappy, for she seemed to have a remarkable effect on the machines in the office, which she admitted she disliked, and on other electrical equip­ment. Overhead lamps would swing to and fro whenever she passed underneath them, and the fluid in photo-copying machines would spill on to the floor. The only plausible explanation for the steep rise in the telephone bill was that Anne-Marie was bored with her job and was mentally clock-watching, stimu­lating a response from the speaking clock. On the day that Anne-Marie was married, all such incidents ceased for good.

Sexual maladjustment is not the only source of tension or distress, however; RSPK may be related to many other conditions. Migraine and temporal lobe epilepsy are common among middle-aged epicentres and sensitives, for example; there is evidence to suggest that there is some link between these disorders and ‘psychic’ faculties. And it has been observed that the parents of many young epicentres hold conflicting religious views, which appear to trigger distress in their children that in turn leads to outbreaks of RSPK.

But perhaps the most significant finding of recent research is that 86 per cent of all poltergeist activity is experienced by families that have recently moved into council houses. It is not hard to find an explanation for this. Any move is bound to be disturbing, and the strangeness of a new house may be compounded by the pressures of a new job for one or both parents, a new school for the children, the loss of friends and so on. In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that tension generated by the members of the family, both individually and as a group, should provoke incidents and noises that cannot be readily explained away, or that ultimately many families, frightened and distraught, should demand to be rehoused. Establishing the cause of poltergeist ac­tivity can be a very complex undertaking, calling for patience and understanding, and for an informed and sympathetic attitude ­the approach, in fact, of a detective. Any attempt to provide a definitive categorisation of actual and potential poltergeist epicentres would need to be based on a thorough psychological and medical examination of all victims who can be identified, but such examinations are hardly ever conducted. Investigators have, on the whole, been too anxious to record incidents or to eliminate the possibility of fraud to concern themselves with the state of victims and their families.

Should exorcism be used to help the victims of poltergeist activity?

It was long held that at the centre of any poltergeist activity would be found a disturbed adolescent girl. But, says ANDREW GREEN, sexual tension in young or old, male or female, may result in an outbreak of the ‘mischievous spirit’

AS MORE AND MORE CASES of poltergeist activity are subjected to rigorous investi­gation by parapsychologists, a clearer picture is emerging, not only of the possible causes of such phenomena, but also of those who are generally the victims. There are, of course, cases that evade classification, but research into recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK) appears to support some broad conclusions.

The sexual drive, or libido, seems to be at the root of much paranormal experience. In the 184os, when the case of the Fox sisters stirred up a great deal of interest in the United States and elsewhere, it was widely assumed that the girls’ experiences were associated with the fact that they had reached puberty. Other cases that were examined at that time appeared to confirm the assump­tion that girls on the threshold of sexual maturity were to be blamed for all myster­ious incidents; only young women, it was thought, could summon up reserves of energy that could move tables, produce strange sounds and cause objects to appear and disappear.

Certainly, many cases today involve girls at about the age of puberty. In the clas­sic case of the Enfield family, which experi­enced intense and protracted disturbances between 1977 and 1978 (see page 291), Janet, the 12-year-old daughter, was clearly the epicentre. Shirley Hitchings of Battersea, another famous victim of poltergeist activity (see also page 293), was 14 years old. One middle-aged mother with a 12-year-old daughter recently told a parapsychologist that her family had experienced a number of incidents of RSPK during the course of a few weeks, both in the kitchen and in her daughter’s bedroom.

Bumps, crashes and saucepans flying about — you know, the usual type of thing. But when Sheila started her menses, it all stopped, of course. It was all a bit of a nuisance at the time, but we are all right now.

Apart from the onset of puberty, other common features have been observed in young victims of RSPK. Janet and her sister in Enfield, for example, were obsessed with Starsky and Hutch, the heroes of the tele­vision serial; Shirley Hitchings adored James Dean, the film star; and another girl was infatuated with Dr Who, the character in the science fiction series. It has been suggested that this passion, this concentration of emo­tion on fictional characters, served to ensure that the power or force deployed by the girls was unconstrained by the influences of nor­mal, day-to-day life. This isolation from the normal was even more apparent in the case of a young Romanian peasant girl, Eleanora Zugun, who was able, between the ages of 12 and 15, to produce marks on her body whenever she felt that her personal ‘devil’ was being insulted. At the slightest word or gesture that she interpreted as offensive, scratches and bites appeared on the girl’s face and arms.

Although young girls are often the focus of RSPK, however, it has been observed that they are rarely the sole agents of the disturb­ances. In the Fox case, for instance, two sisters out of three were involved, and at Enfield both Janet and her sister were at the centre of many of the incidents. (Another member of the family, Janet’s brother, was attending a school for the mentally sub­normal; subnormality is often — though by no means always — associated with poltergeist activity.)

In some cases girls are not involved at all, though a hundred years ago male victims of RSPK were often ignored or discounted, so entrenched was the view that pubescent girls were the source of poltergeist activity. The experiences of one sensitive, D. D. Home, did provoke more serious examination of paranormal incidents associated with men, but the investigators were content to con­clude that Mr Home was a homosexual and to leave the matter there.

In recent years male sensitives, young boys and men alike, have received a more sympathetic hearing. One to-year-old boy was filmed as he lay in bed, awake, while a walking-stick moved of its own accord, in erratic jerks, behind the head of his bed. Iike many young epicentres, he was of an ex­tremely nervous disposition and, again in common with other victims, he was anaemic.

Then there was a fascinating case involving two boys in Glasgow between August 1974 and May 1975. The boys were 15 and years old, and they lived with their parents in a tenement flat. A series of ‘peculiar sounds’ was heard, followed by communicative raps; it turned out that the boys, without knowing it, were linked telepathically with an old man who lived in a flat on the ground floor and who was afflicted by a malignant tumour. As the old man’s condition deteriorated, the raps became more frequent. They ceased, suddenly, when the old man died.

And perhaps the most celebrated case of all is that of Matthew Manning, who at the age of II was able to produce genuine phenomena at will. Disturbances occurred both at his Cambridge home and at school: beds moved; uncle in a large house in York. Whenever the younger man entered his study the room appeared to react to his presence: his desk moved; chairs shuffled across the floor; the curtains blew into the room even on airless days; the windows opened and shut very rapidly. The incidents persisted for nearly three years, increasing in frequency and intensity all the time, until mental exhaus­tion forced the man to seek medical assist­ance. He was found to be sexually impotent and was given treatment. Within a week the phenomena ceased.