I rather wish I had not written about the electricity going off – I put a hex on something
Round about 2am on Sunday morning we had a power cut. Such things are not unknown round our way – we usually get one or two a year at least. I used to assume it was because of the vulnerability of the transmission lines to bad weather in the hills, but now I think they are more a problem of sub stations – this one was quite localised, not all the village was affected
Since they are not unusual we are well prepared. There is always a torch & a battery radio close to the bed, & a supply of household candles downstairs in case more wide spread illumination is needed
What makes power cuts far more tedious for me now is the bedside alarm-clock radio. I had to buy a new one about 2 years ago & got the only one available which could receive Long Wave, without thinking about the other features at all. So it was only when unpacked I found that it was all push-button operated & could not even be switched on without reference to the guidance notes which came on a piece of paper the size of a bedsheet (now reduced to something more the size of a pillow case since I cut off all the non-English sections)
There is a total of 19 separate buttons/rocker switches to press. I have never bothered to work out the total number of permutations/combinations on offer – I just grumble that even if each were just binary there would be ½ million to choose from
Once I got used to preselect (I tried it years ago & decided it was far too much of a fiddle having to remember which was which on each wavelength) I found that it offers considerable advantages for coping with another of our problems – unreliable FM reception. The extent to which this occurs around the country took even the BBC by surprise a few years back when they tried to take Radio4 off Long Wave. I suspect localised temperature inversions may be to blame – odd things happen to automatic radio controlled garage doors for example during inversions
Like a lot of people round here I had virtually given up ever trying to tune to FM – you waste too much time wondering if you have not found the station because you have been a bit too heavy handed with the tuning knob or because the signal is just not there. But with presets I do know at least that it is tuned to a frequency which picks up the station signal when it is there, & can just move on if nothing is audible.
But it is quite a palaver having to reset everything when the electricity comes back on. Having done all that on Sunday morning I went back to sleep, only to find that there had been a second power cut & I had to go through the whole business again when I woke up.
What makes this story so particularly galling is that one of the 19 buttons just switches from GMT to BST or back again. How handy, & what a bother that saves
Except when you have a power cut on the night the clocks go forward
Related post: Electricity pylons
