Isolation is not glorious, it’s barbaric!

I’M looking at a picture on the wall. It’s of a whitewashed stone house sitting at the foot of a tree-clad hill, a large pointy mountain rearing up behind it, an expanse of grass and hedge nudging the walls of the house.

Idyllic, eh? There’s probably a brook babbling somewhere nearby and the people inside the house are no doubt extensively romantic.

But here’s the thing, or things. Where are the neighbours? It looks like the kind of place where next door is in another county.

Where are the shops? Are they in a faraway town? Or a van that comes round once a week unless it snows? Why are there no electricity or phone cables in view? Is that a mobile phone mast half way up the mountain or a lone pine tree? A pine tree.

Is there mains water or is that what the brook is babbling on about?

In other words, this is not an idyll, it’s a nightmare. The kind of nightmare visited upon us last week when we had an 18-hour power cut, helpfully commencing just before teatime.

It was dark, it was cold, we couldn’t cook or heat water. Whenever you left a room you had to remember to take your light – a puny battery lamp – with you, holding it above your head like a B-movie actor going in to a cellar where everyone in the cinema knows there’s something awful lurking.

No TV or radio. No internet. Only books held close to a tiny torch for entertainment. Conversation running out after the first couple of hours.

Fortunately we did have a car that could take us to a chip shop. And friends who would make us up flasks of hot water. And the engineers worked hard to restore a minimum of power by midnight, even if it was a temporary generator that would apparently die if we tried to use the electric shower.

( We did try to use it next morning and the generator, which had been happily humming under our window, made noises that seemed to say, “I’m going to die!”. So we washed in the sink.)

But what if we lived in that romantic whitewashed house in the middle of nowhere, sometime in the long ago? Life would be like that all the time, only smellier.

So let’s hear it for towns and technology.