Radio silence

In about half an hour, we, along with the oddly shaped chunk of housing estate which makes up our electricity sub-station area, will lose electrical power, hopefully to be returned around six hours later at 1600. Which, inter alia, includes loss of our Internet connection, this being dependant on a BT router which is plugged into the domestic power supply. And so, radio silence.

EDF have sent us several letters, several text messages, several email messages and called us a couple of times on our landline. They have not done a door-to-door and I don't suppose they will have a chap in fancy dress ringing a bell as the hour approaches, so maybe there are still some people who don't know who might like to have known. While, as BH points out, probably half the people will be at work for the duration and don't need to know. Not like us more or less housebound pensioners.

In the run up to P-hour, we have made our preparations.

Yesterday, I roasted (perhaps for the first time for a decade) a piece of pork, to be taken cold for lunch today. BH made some soup, now in a thermos flask, cracked out of a remote cupboard for the purpose.

I charged up my rarely used mobile phone charger so that we are not completely cut off from the rest of the world in the afternoon, by which time it is apt to have run down a bit.

We thought about the fake coal fire in our front room, gas powered with electrical complications, and we believe that the electrical complications are battery powered and so unaffected. We will be able to get a kilowatt or so of heat out of that - the equivalent to the ubiquitous one-bar electric bar of my childhood. The thing you all huddled over during the long winter evenings.

Our champion Aladdin paraffin heaters (see, for example, reference 2) are long gone. Far too complicated and difficult to reinstate anything of the sort for this short outage.

But I have stocked up on bricks (see, for example, reference 1) and will, should it prove necessary, be able to put together a cooking fire on the back patio in short order, something I used to be a star at in my Boy Scout days. We might even get to use some of the miscellaneous timber in the garage, kept for many years against the day when it might come in handy.

So we have done what is sensible and reasonable. Nevertheless, it is possible that I will feel the need to visit the library later in the day, to take on a bit of their heating and to log on to their Internet.

PS: a good, hard frost last night, so a bright but cold morning. What will the house be like by mid afternoon, when the winter sun has sunk below our horizon?

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/fourth-brick.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/derby-action.html.