Well, this is rather fine. I’m sitting here on Sunday morning, lit only by the overhead laptop light running from the battery, in an otherwise blacked out room, and Neil is in the courtyard with the camping stove, a saucepan and tea bags. There is no sound but the hiss of the gas and the thudding of my fingers.
When I stop writing and wander about the strangely silent and dim house, I can imagine how things used to be before electricity. We’re having one of those planned power cuts, you see. Could be off for half an hour, could be off all day. It doesn’t matter, because you get so much else done when you don’t have electricity Alright, so you can’t do the hoovering, run a tap, or stay warm, but you can sweep up something, tidy up something, and later, rustle up something that doesn’t need cooking. You could read a book if the shutters weren’t shut against the cold and keeping out the light. You could read on your Kindle if the battery hadn’t died. You could write up your notes (see above re: closed shutters and lack of light). Plenty of things to get done. A taste of the old days, except we know that the power will come back on at some time, and we don’t yet need to fill a bucket from the water tank.
The gas is still hissing.
We trotted out for a pizza last night (Saturday). We were going to go to the taverna, but the high school class was holding a fundraiser for its end-of-school trip later in the year, and the taverna was already booked out. Just like the old days.
The gas has stopped hissing.
I’m sure some readers will remember ‘those’ days. Those summers when both bars were so full, people were sitting on the steps, and where the taverna was so busy, there was a queue to get in. It is still like that in the summer, but there are fewer people on the steps, and that part of the season doesn’t seem to last as long.
My tea has arrived!
Who knows what the rest of today holds? Who can say when we might be back on the grid and back online? I’ll let you know.
