Power to The People

Or not as the case is at present. We have had a power cut every day for the last four days, ranging in duration from 10 hrs to just 1 hour. The annoying thing is that they always seem to occur at cooking-of-meal-times. The first day I had literally just switched off the hob and was serving up. Rowan said, rather spookily, "Can we have candles?" and lo and behold the power cut out and we needed candles! The second night I had just started the tea so we had to abort and go to McDonalds (yuk). The boys thought it was a great treat. For me it brought back too many memories of not having access to the internet other than via Mac's WiFi. Yesterday it cut at lunch time but that was no major issue as we were just having baggette and a myriad of cheeses. Today again it cut at lunchtime and that made me furious because we had fired up Jesse the Esse just to check that all was in order ready for when the colder weather arrives.

Now Jesse is a wood-burning range that does our cooking, hot water, and various heating systems. She was bought as part of our carbon-neutral, not-having-to-rely-on-external-power-sources drive. Rather irritatingly she actually needs a Laddomat gismo that keeps her water circulating because Roger, the water tank, is higher than she is by 50cm due to the layout of our house. If she didn't have that on the circuit, the back water boiler would boil dry and Jesse would be shafted so to speak. And irritatingly that gismo runs on electricity. And guess what we didn't have today - sigh. So, having got her up to a nice hot test temperature (and all the windows and doors open because it's still warm here), with food lined up for cooking, we then had to 'dump the heat' ie waste all our hot water, and put the fire out tout suite with wet sand. I was less than pleased with EDF, France's electricity provider. However, we're back on now.