Power has just returned after another outage, this time for a couple of hours, although I’ve not had a message from National Grid to say that it’s fixed and the estimate for the repair was 8pm so I’m not trusting that’s the end of it just yet.
Fortunately I’d just finished heating my lunch of home-made peanam soup before we lost the power. My daughter wasn’t so lucky.
Losing the electricity supply is quite a shocking reminder of how dependent on it our lives have become. I can (vaguely) recall the three-day week in 1974(?) and when power cuts happened we just used to light a few candles if it was dark, start a fire if it was cold and break out the board for a game of Monotony ready to start WWIII.
These days the first complaints start when the internet disappears, especially given that we don’t have a reliable mobile signal so all our mobile connectivity actually relies on our “wired” internet connection which itself will be down due to the lack of power. Then I have a few bits and pieces on a UPS that I prefer not to fail in an uncontrolled way, so if it looks like we’re in for the long haul I have to power them off cleanly.
After that there’s all the fun with the washing machine that was halfway through a cycle, the dishwasher that’s still full of water, the bread machine that contains a half-made loaf and if I want to pass the time by reading a book oh, bugger. I finished one last night and now I can’t download a new one. And then there is the ceremony of the re-setting of the clocks.
I’m going to try to recover the bread by baking it in the oven. If the power goes off again, it’s probably chicken food.
