The dog ate my homework

Yesterday’s attempt to publish my daily musings were thwarted by elemental forces. Honest.

When I first came to live permanently in this wonderful village of Glossa, I was surprised to be told by my elderly neighbour to unplug everything – including the television, the fridge and the phone – whenever there was a rumble of thunder. I, foolishly and somewhat arrogantly, considered this to be rather an outdated precaution.

It reminded me of the stories of my great-grandmother who, being used to gas lighting in her house and distrustful of the new-fangled electricity, was terrified one day by the sight of a light fitting without its bulb. She knew an electric shock could kill and reasoned that deadly electricity was pouring out of the unstoppered lamp.

It turned out, as you will have guessed, that they were both right in their own ways.

Six years ago to the day, on the evening of 22^nd September 2005, there were faint rumbles of thunder over the mainland as I went to bed. I did not have a fridge or a TV to unplug and anyway, it was not part of my belief system any more than covering the mirrors at night as some of the oldest ladies in the village do.

Just before dawn, I was woken by a huge explosion and that particular electrical smell of an appliance dying expensively.

I realised that a split second earlier, there had been a simultaneous lighting/thunder flash/bang. The power was off, but that quite often happens during bad storms and my supply was anyway a little precarious.

Let me explain that.

The house we bought had been built in the traditional way. A reinforced concrete skeleton of columns and beams was filled in with that type of brick which is mainly holes. Although it had been started in 1964, it had never been finished. There were windows – without any glass in them - and shutters, which had been left unpainted for forty years . There was cold water only and a toilet that probably emptied out into the suspiciously green patch in the garden.

We had the rendering done, put glass in the windows, painted the shutters and dug a septic tank. So far so good.

Attached to the side of our one story house with its traditional dusty concrete floor, was a breeze block (cinder block) room which had a chimney. So with the addition of a cheap wood-burning stove, it become my bedroom and office until the time we could build a new storey and have proper tiles on the floor.

Which required a building permit.

Which took time.

And without the building permit, it was not possible to take the electricity, as they say here. Now, I could live with oil lamps for a few months if necessary, but part of my job as the advanced guard - Jo was in Cardiff earning the money - was to set up our website. Which meant we had to take the phone and take the internet in the leaky shack which housed me and my laptop. 

The phone line eventually arrived, tied off to a couple of convenient trees and I had a real telephone sitting on the plastic bedside table that was also my desk and the nerve centre of our little empire.

A generator was tried and found unable to provide a clean enough current for my fussy laptop and printer. My white-haired neighbour – the one you met in paragraph two – came to my rescue and let me run a long cable to the house he owns above ours. He did not live there but came daily to tend the garden, as indeed, he still does and long may he enjoy it.

The only problem I ever had with this arrangement was getting him to let me pay the bill. Remember, he didn’t live at the house and was never there after dark. He used no electricity at all and yet, every two months, I had to force him to take money.

So, back to that bleak dawn in September 2005. Lightning had struck a neighbour’s chimney and spread its deadly charge through the nearby ground.

I had not unplugged the telephone: it had unplugged itself. The socket had blown across the room with enough force to drag the handset onto the floor. Our cold water supply arrived in the kitchen by way of an iron pipe buried in the wall. It was no longer buried. The charge threw all the mortar and plaster above the pipe to the other side of the kitchen where some of the sharper shards were still embedded.

I had not unplugged the laptop either and as it was connected to the printer, both were toast. (It is a shame that I didn’t have a toaster, or I could have made a little more of that).

Yesterday, as I started to write the Wednesday chapter, there were rumblings of thunder over the mainland. Which swiftly came closer. You will, I believe, not be unduly amazed to learn that I unplugged my laptop and the telephone with great alacrity.

The storm came and went several times and I never got to write my blog.

That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Let’s talk.