Today we were visited by Old Man Power Cut.
It turns out that many things in this city have no back-up generators. Traffic lights, railway signals, police stations… what spare power-generating capacity was available apparently gets dedicated mostly to making burglar alarms run incessantly for no readily apparent reason.
My train into the city this morning only got as far as Newmarket, where we sat for three quarters of an hour and were asked to all get out while the various railway operatives buzzed around asking each other what to do. None of them seemed to have particularly clear ideas, so I elected to walk the rest of the way to university. I amused myself by listening to Smog on my iPod:
When the power goes out
At the grocery store
We just take, take take
We just take, take take
I arrived more than a little water-logged, and just in time to receive a hand-delivered letter from the Vice-Chancellor, addressed generally to anybody loitering about the campus, informing us that the campus was closed for the day. To be honest I didn’t have any particularly clear reasons for being there more than any other place without power, so I called Annette, and we went to her place to discuss interior decorating and read books. I was treated to one of her fine internet-recorded lunches, which had accidentally but fortuitously been left behind that very morning by her partner JSR. Very fine it was, and you can see it here.
The power eventually came back to the central city in the early afternoon, so I returned to the university to engage in the studying I had originally planned.
I returned home in the evening to discover that my house was roughly at the centre of a small circle of remaining powerlessness, so I went to have a cup of tea with C. The lights came back on as I was walking up her driveway, about ten hours after the whole thing started, but we had the cup of tea anyway.
Finest overheard rumour of the day: “Somebody has blown up the Harbour Bridge”. This had a certain minimal degree of plausibility given that the existential status of the bridge could not be visually determined from the particular vantage point at which the rumour was reported. However, it turns out not to have been the case. On the other hand, I didn’t believe that the power cut extended to Hamilton either, and that did turn out to be true. In my defence, I believe theirs might technically be considered a separate power cut that happened at roughly the same time due to more or less the same bit of squally weather.
All in all, I have come to the conclusion that power cuts are not very good. No more power cuts, please.