Power

Woke up this morning to find there was no power. Looked out of the window to see none there. Mind drifted, unhelpfully, onto the curious geography of the sub-station areas on our estate. Housing estate that is.

Next onto all the cooking which is a feature of this particular day. How on earth were we going to manage to cook the traditional lentil soup? Was the gas bottle for the camping stove, a two burner affair, not used in earnest for going on twenty years, going to be completely empty? What is the leak rate of such things? What about women and children?

Then what about the computer, my usual early morning activity these days? There would be a bit of battery life in the laptop and rather more in the new telephone and its 4Gb of main memory - a lot more, I might say, than that of the laptop. What about the internet? The land-line might be OK with the telephone people (hopefully) having their own power, but what about the router which certainly did not? And could I trust my slightly creaky OneDrive to put itself back together, once we had everything back online?

Then onto our provision of candles and candle stick holders. We do have some provision for these emergencies, unlike in my childhood, dotted with both gas and electricity cuts, against which we took more serious precautions. I settled for reading by candle light.

At this point, around 0545, the electricity popped back on.

PS: in the course of cranking up the lentil soup, I find that the new lentils from Costcutter (see reference 1) are of a paler shade than those in the jar. Have Costcutter truly been cutting costs? In any event, soup now well into its first boiling. Three cheers for the giant saucepan, bought on retirement from John Lewis of Kingston and which has, in its ten years with us, averted all the boilings-over which we would otherwise have had, with boiling red lentils having a tendency to rise, like boiling milk.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/horton-clockwise.html.