The other night my
husband decided he was going to watch the ten o’clock news. I hate watching the news at this time of
night – it’s just so depressing. So I
went upstairs to read. But just as I was about to climb into bed the light from
the main blub went out. I thought that
the blub had blown, but when I tried the bedside lamp, that didn’t come on
either, and through the open window, alarms were going mad. We had a power cut.
As people came out
of their doors we realised that the whole street was without electricity. It generated (pardon the pun) quite a sense
of community spirit and would have been fun if I hadn’t been worried about our
freezer, which we had just filled up, defrosting.
Fortunately we had
candles and matches to hand, and we lit ourselves to bed.
To me it felt quite
Dickensian to be walking upstairs to the light of the candle, but it also made
me wonder at the number of potential house fires in those days with so many
naked flames about.
My husband, who is
more pragmatic, said it reminded him of the 1970’s. His comment triggered a childhood memory of sitting
around a fire in the middle of winter for warmth, food and light. It amazed me that the two periods in history
were similar and yet the latter was still in living memory.
The electricity,
thankfully, came back on before we went to sleep but my final waking thought
was how much we depend on electricity these days. In a dystopian image I began to wonder what it
would be like if our fuel ran out and we could no longer use our computers or
charge our mobile phones. Even our
landlines today are plugged into the wall.
It would be like being plunged right back into the dark ages. Literally.
So much for progress then?
