Kayt Turner: 'It's astonishing how silent a house suddenly becomes when a power cut hits'

Published on Saturday 27 February 2010 19:20

SATURDAY afternoon and I've got the place to myself. I've bundled Mr Turner out of the house. He didn't get the option of not going to watch the football. I had his coat on his back and pushed him out of the door almost as soon as it was mentioned.

The September Issue was all teed up on the TV and a box of Thornton's Truffle Selection was sitting on the coffee table waiting for me to crack them open. Bliss.

I got a whole four minutes of the movie and only one truffle in my gob before everything went pfttt. Even though you only have one appliance on, it's astonishing how silent a house suddenly becomes when a power cut hits.

Annoying. Very, very annoying – but not the end of the world. I couldn't let the whole afternoon be a washout. After all, there was still an almost-full box of truffles waiting to be consumed while I waited for normal service to be resumed.

When that hadn't happened after about an hour or so, I thought it best to find out how long this state of affairs was going to carry on for. Except how do you find a telephone number in this marvellously technological day and age? Yell.com? Not without the small matter of electricity. Finally, I found an old telephone directory at the back of a bookshelf.

A little digging turned up a switchboard number for the power company. But the lovely lady I spoke to told me we weren't having a power cut. As I stood in the gloom, flicking the light switch up and down (well, it's not as if it was going on or off) I tried to convince her otherwise. Eventually, she said she'd send out an emergency electrician. But it would take about four hours for him to get to us.

So, while I waited, I thought it best to hunt out the torches and candles. I say torches – I could actually only find the one torch. And it turned out to be pretty useless. Candles, though: plenty of them. Tealights, scented pillars, votive and tapers. You name it, I've got it. We even have loads of candlesticks and tealight holders. It may be dark, but I wasn't going to let standards slip and put up with candles just jammed into empty beer bottles.

Although I would probably have been as well to. Because contrary to the impression that prolonged viewing of Cranford and Lark Rise to Candleford might give, candles really don't give out that much light. Or heat. This was a cold February afternoon, in Scotland. It was bloody freezing. And I didn't need much light to know the look Mr Turner had on his face when I bleated: "But our central heating's gas – why is it so cold?"

Any hopes I might have had of the electrician putting everything right were quickly dashed by the sound of him sucking air through his teeth. Turns out we needed a whole new fuse box. And all our emergency guy was allowed to do was to isolate the power supply before wishing us a pleasant evening on his way out the door.

So Mr Turner and I groped about in the dark for a while and thought: 'What did they do in the olden days?' Before TV and computers filled our time. We had no lights, no heating. How did our forebears fill those long, dark winter nights? Of course, you know what they did. And without wishing to be indelicate, that's what we did: we went to bed and listened to the wireless.