> Mrs. O'Neill's Blog: Jock Bauer

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Jock Bauer


Last night when we were eating dinner our power failed. The computer in the kitchen shut down, the CD player went quiet and the fridge shuddered, then stopped making that low, bubbling sound. Power cuts aren’t that unusual in this neck of the woods, so we lit some candles and finished the rest of our meal.

The weekend had started rather inauspiciously with a car crash. On the way home from school, a landrover sailed out of a side road, hit my car on the passenger side and sent me swerving off into a railed fence. I was fine. Not injured, but shaken. My car was not so good.

Then the ‘stuff’ started. If you’ve been through it recently you’ll know what I mean. ‘Phone calls, breakdown trucks, insurance details, complicated re-scheduling and so on…

So last night’s power cut was a pause in a frantic 24 hours. Not quite Jack Bauer, but a Wigtownshire version of it.

It was funny, but it seemed like the first real moment of silence in a long time. And even when we had some electricity restored, we still kept the candles lit and tiptoed about. Later we watched the lunar eclipse and managed one photograph, before our digital camera announced it was out of power.

But that was okay, because so were we.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Glad you were OK. We had one of those on the M1 last year - we were OK, car not quite so. And I know what ouu mean about the rather wonderful silence that comes with a power cut. Ours went out at 9pm on New Years Eve and we saw the New Year in with Monopoly by candlelight. Sad, I know, but we'd been at a big party the night before!

Liz O'Neill said...

I can't even imagine what an accident on the M1 would be like! At least around here the roads were relatively quiet. I found out (on Google Earth) that the part of the road where the crash happened was called 'Market Slap' A 'slap' is a Scots word apparently for a gap or a narrow passage. Doubly apt.