I thought dealing with power cuts was easy – then the lights went out

Power cuts – an absolute de-light (Picture: Getty Images) For reasons I can never really be bothered to find out, the South Oxfordshire town I live in experiences quite frequent power cuts. Usually it’s over very quickly, leaving only the tedious business of resetting the microwave and oven clocks. Plus the mild indignity of surviving three whole minutes without Wi-Fi while the router leisurely reboots. So when the power went off at 10pm last Sunday, I barely reacted. Instead, I sat there in the dark waiting for everything to power back up. But after a few seconds, then a minute, then three, nothing happened. This looked like a proper old-school power cut. I opted not to mention it to my wife just yet – she was upstairs obliviously enjoying a bath with her Kindle (battery powered), some candles (fire powered) and a few gallons of hot bubbly water (power requirements already fulfilled). When the electricity cuts out, you’re often left feeling some-Watt powerless (Picture: Getty Images) But soon the neighbourhood WhatsApp group started popping off. At first, it was people checking that it wasn’t just their house. Then came the screenshots from the electricity company’s alert email suggesting there was a decent chance that the street wouldn’t be reconnected until the following morning. Suddenly, this was getting serious. I mean, not serious-serious, obviously. Nobody was trapped down a mine. Although in terms of lighting and Netflix access, there wasn’t much in it. We were looking at up to 12 hours without lights, TV, WiFi or any reliable means of charging the various rectangles through which we all conduct our lives. The WhatsApp group’s mood shifted accordingly. Attention quickly turned to fridges and freezers. ‘How long would our milk last?’, ‘what about the frozen food?!’, ‘can we claim for the loss of crinkle cut chips…?’ Within a few minutes, we’d gone from mild inconvenience to collective anxiety about the structural integrity of Mini Milks. Not even the complete failure of all local power can diminish the brutal force of the neighbourhood group chat (Picture: Getty Images) Which reminded me that we had three Sainsbury’s knock-off Magnums in the freezer. I decided the responsible thing to do was to cut down on potential wastage and immediately reduce that number to two. So, armed with an endangered ice cream, I lit half a dozen tealights and went to sit outside. And that’s when something rather unexpected happened: I realised it was actually quite nice being outside in the (mostly) dark, eating an ice cream in my dressing gown. Without the usual glow from houses and televisions, the night sky was unusually clear. I could see stars, satellites slowly moving overhead and all sorts of things I presumably fail to notice most evenings because I’m inside half-watching Reacher while simultaneously glancing at clips on my phone of South American footballers karate kicking each other. ‘This is a supermarket-brand Magnum, the most powerful ice cream in the world and will blow your tastebuds clean off…’ (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto) For a while, I felt rather pleased with how well I was adapting to it all. Electricity’s overrated, anyway. I had candles, a chocolate and almond ice cream and the entire observable universe to look at. Okay, sure, I hadn’t really adapted to anything. I was sitting on an outdoor sofa eating food preserved by an electric freezer, while occasionally checking a fully charged phone to find out when some strangers somewhere were going to make my electricity work again. And that was when I started wondering how long I could actually cope if they couldn’t fix it. Because almost everything I rely on either stopped working immediately or was suddenly running on borrowed time. The router was dead. The television was useless. My phone and laptop had become finite resources. Even the combi-boiler needed ‘leccy, for crying out loud. For someone surrounded by more technology than any generation in history, I suddenly felt remarkably powerless. In modern society’s defence, the system normally works so brilliantly that there’s no real reason to think about it. You flick a switch and a light comes on. You plug your phone into the wall to recharge and somehow the National Grid shoves Instagram Reels back into it. Most of us don’t really understand the process beyond there possibly being wires involved, yet we’ve become completely reliant on this enormously complicated infrastructure because, almost every day of our lives, it just works. Consistently and brilliantly. Until it doesn’t, of course. ‘Look at the stars. Look how they shine for you. And everything you do. Yeah, they were all yel-white.’ They’re white, aren’t they? Don’t listen to Chris Martin (Picture: NASA/Getty Images) As the dark evening went on, I wondered if those well-prepared/slightly odd folk with generators, solar chargers and cupboards full of supplies aren’t quite as daft as I thought. I’m not about to start stockpiling tins of corned beef or digging a bunker under the shed to escape to for when the UN invades the Thames Valley. But there’s presumably a sensible middle ground between preparing for the collapse of civilisation and having absolutely no contingency plan beyond ‘better eat at least one of those defrosting ice creams’. By this point I’d resolved to change. I’d buy proper torches. Get some power banks. Keep them charged. Maybe get one of those little solar chargers. I decided I’d become resilient, ready and capable of weathering whatever minor infrastructure failures the future threw at us. Perhaps I’d even start keeping some emergency supplies in the cupboard. Nothing weird. Just sensible stuff. Bottles of water. Batteries. Tinned ham. Several hundred flare guns. You’ll need a longer reach than that to land one on Reacher (Picture: Amazon Prime Video) This power cut, I figured, had taught me something. It had shown me something too: I was fascinated by the infinite majesty of the stars and the night sky. Maybe… I’d buy a telescope! Then the lights came back on. I checked the freezer. The remaining two snide Magnums were fine. I abandoned the stars and went back inside to resume half-watching Reacher while scrolling clips of people beating each other up on my now-recharging phone. Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. Share your views in the comments below. 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