Tale guide

“You’re going to a first world country,” they said. “Where everything works,” they said.

It goes very dark on the British Isle by six pm in the winter. There is some light from bedside lamps in the neighbours’ homes or the occasional ceiling light in a hall across the road. The streetlights all work but are often shrouded in mist that throws a haunting shade onto the occasional passerby.

Outside Storm Arwen is sweeping down off the North Sea across Scotland, down through Yorkshire and into Wales, bringing with it tons of snow to the high lying ground, rain, sleet and hail for the rest and all being driven by winds of up to 100 kilometers per hour.

Anything loose or floating in the air like a virus or two, are swept out to sea. Trees bend and break under the strain and the wind howls its anger through empty castle corridors, built centuries back. Not that we would notice much of that because by that time, we are tucked up warm and cozy in bed watching Saturday night’s Graham Norton show.

The rather unusual alarm system that comes with the cottage has never been on because there is nothing for it to detect, so it lies dormant and silent year in and year out.

By nine o’clock us old timers are tired, and we settle down into a deep sleep. The passage light is on, so we don’t stumble én route to the loo in the middle of the night. The boiler maintains a temperature of 22° throughout the house that is itself, insulated from the cold and any passing noise outside by perfectly engineered double glazing.

We are a very long way from burst pipes, load shedding, water shortages and potholes. All is well with the world.

I am awakened from a deep sleep and dreams of pretty girls, sandy beaches and sunshine by the sound of an alarm ringing off the wall in the passage.

“The power’s gone,” announces Ann from the pitch blackness. I fumble around with the bedside table drawer where I have religiously kept a torch out of habit learnt from many years in South Africa where sudden and extended bouts of darkness were a regular occurrence.

“I’ll sort it,” I hasten to reassure her as my hand finds the outer casing of the torch. I sit up in the bed and switch it on. ‘Well, that’s not going to work,’ I think to myself as I realise that the torch has no batteries, something I must have forgotten to attend to a year back when I first put it there.

‘Not to worry,’ I reassure myself as my intuitive thoughts lead me spontaneously to the cell phone. Although cased in black, the phone was not too difficult to locate lying on top of the bedside table and I switch on its torch. “Ah,” I announce, “let there be light.”

Looking out of the window, it becomes evident that the entire area has lost power. The darkness is intense and although I can vaguely hear the howling wind, its difficult to see what’s happening out there.

“I think I’ll phone Eskom.” (Really! Well that also comes from so many years of habit.) (For crying in a bucket, don’t be so harsh.)

“Why?” came the quick retort from the other side of the bed. “They couldn’t help before, what makes you think they can help you now?”

“Do we have any candles,” I ask, and Ann leads me in the light of my cell phone to a display cabinet in the lounge where she finds one partially used candle in a ceramic cup that has successfully been displayed as a treasured ornament ever since it was unpacked from our move a year ago. Come to think of it, the last time it was used it must have been during load shedding.

‘Neither of us smoke,’ comes to mind. “How will we light this?” I ask innocently.

“Why don’t you try the long nose lighter you use for the braai?” ‘This girl is on the ball’.

I have to take her back to her bed so as to avoid an accident in the darkness. Then I proceed to the kitchen to recover the lighter. This one works and the candle is lit.

“Shall we have a cup of tea?” My understanding is that in times of crisis, the English have a cup of tea.

“Good idea,” Ann answers from the bedroom. I turn and switch on the kitchen light to see better what I’m up to. Of course, there’s no power! But we do have a gas cooker, so I turn the control knob of one of the burners on and nothing happens. Of course, the electronic starter works off electricity.

This is getting ridiculous.

‘Ah, use the long nose lighter dummkopf,’ just random thoughts.

I light the burner, fill a pot with water and off we go. Tea’s made, candle flickers romantically on the dresser.

“How can we find out if someone is attending to the outage?” I ask.

“We’re in a first world country,” says Ann. “We can google it.”

“Yeh right.” Google ‘how do I find out when the electricity will be restored’ The page opens and asks for our postal code. We enter the postal code and immediately a detailed message comes up to advise that our area has been affected by the storm and the electricians will attend to the fault as soon as it is safe to do so, and the anticipated time of restoration shouldn’t exceed 4 pm.

“So that’s pretty cool.” The wonders of modern efficiency!

“Speaking of cool, is the central heating working?” asks Ann.

“It should do as it runs on gas,” spoken with my usual confidence. But upon inspection, the boiler system requires electricity with which to manage the flow of gas. So that’s out the question.

“It’s not working sweetheart. Better tuck down under the covers. It’s going to be a cold night.”

The alarm system has been whining all this time, so my next move is to try and silence it. Like any true South African, I know a thing or two about alarm systems and I know therefore that the reason why its whining is that its battery is flat and in the absence of supporting electricity, it is unable to stay alert, so it needs to tell you that something isn’t working as it should.

I can silence it by inserting the code and pressing the reset button. Simple if you know the code!

Its now something after midnight and I make my way into the study and by the light of my trusty cell phone, find my big black box where I keep our the operating manuals together with some old photographs, the odd recipe print out that Ann must have done, quite a few letters and empty envelopes that should have been filed or thrown, old and new passports and identity cards, some out of date bank cards and a few plastic toys the grandkids found in their McDonald Happy Meal boxes and dropped in, just in case they would want them in future.

The alarm operating manual was the last document at the very bottom of the pile that I had to go through methodically, document after document, because I had no idea what it looked like.

I have the code, ‘eureka!’ I insert the code as directed and press the sound button and, guess what, the alarm goes quiet.

We decide that the best thing for it would be to go back to sleep in the warmth of our bed and tackle the day when the sun comes out or to be more accurate, when the daylight breaks.

“If they are only able to restore the electricity by 4pm, you will at least be able to take the car out of the garage and go to the shops to buy some stuff to keep us going through the day,” suggests Ann.

“Except the garage door requires electricity for it to open,” came my considered reply.

“But if you go in through the pedestrian door, you’ll be able to turn the door to manual and push it open.”

‘I knew there was a reason why I married this genius’, me thinks to myself.

“Of course. Great thinking Batman.” But then I realise that I won’t be able to open the pedestrian door because at the end of summer, I had carefully and neatly stacked the garden furniture in the corner of the garage up against the pedestrian door, so the chances of getting in that way would be seriously impaired.

Better we sleep and see what transpires. As we settle, the alarm starts whining again and everything I tried thereafter just wouldn’t silence it.

Eventually I hung a thick coat over the unit in a vain attempt to muffle the noise and closed all the doors.

At 09h00 we were awakened when all the house lights that I had absent mindedly switched the ‘on’ switches to ‘on’ as I stumbled around during the night, came on at once and in the passage, the alarm finally went silent.

And so we avoided yet another catastrophe and got to thinking that maybe we need to buy a generator for next time. But a generator would be a little over the top.

I mean this is a first world country. Maybe we should invest in a few torch batteries and extra candles which would be useful to have around the house the next time a storm passes by.

I guess the only difference between South Africa and England is that the disasters in the former are generally man made while the disasters in the UK are of natural origin.

c'est la vie