The night I died, but didn’t
Grandad July 6th, 2007
We had a winter storm last night.
I don’t remember the weatherman saying anything about storms. But then I didn’t see the weather forecast.
Anyway, we were sitting watching something really crap on television with the volume turned up so we could hear it over the wind. Herself chose the programme.
Next thing - POP - I was sitting in darkness and silence.
I thought for a moment I had died [it was a very bad programme], or that maybe I had gone blind and deaf simultaneously. But then I heard a quiet “f*ck” from out of the dark, so I knew the electricity had gone.
Being country dwellers, we always have plenty of candles and an oil lamp so I fired them up.
Now, candles and oil lamps don’t really give enough light to read by. Not with our sight anyway. So we had to talk. We discussed going to bed, but we decided there was nothing to do there as we couldn’t read there either.
Herself was all wired up because she had blogged yesterday for the first time in months and was in a fierce communicative mood.
We decided to phone a neighbour to see if he was OK. He wasn’t really pleased at being woken in the dark to be told there was a power cut. We told him it was too early for sleep [it was only one in the morning], and hung up.
We then decided to ring all our friends who we hadn’t spoken to in a long time. It seemed a nice friendly thing to do. I rang one elderly relative to ask if she had died yet. She said she hadn’t but thanked me for asking. I rang another friend about some money I owed him. I won’t tell you where he told me to stick my money, but that’s another debt I can forget about.
For some reason, people weren’t very talkative, so we got tired of that and went to bed in the end.
This morning, the power was still off. And Sod’s law kicked in and I woke early. So I sat in the cold and drank water. [Why is a house always colder during a power cut, even when you don't have heating?]
For once, all the trees are still standing, which is very unusual. But then I haven’t walked around the estate yet.
There were quite a few messages on our answering service, as we’d switched the phone off last night. They weren’t very nice messages for some reason.
The power came back at half nine. I knew because the house suddenly got warmer.
Now I am in the process of catching up on all the cups of tea I missed out on.
Then I think I’ll have a nap.
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