ANTICIPATING THE BLACKOUT

MY ELECTRICITY supply was cut on Monday morning. I wasn’t particularly surprised.

Just the first of the post-election power cuts, I thought. It was inevitable. But soon the street was crowded with maintenance vehicles and teams of men in red overalls but no berets, so I deduced they were not EFF officials about to expropriate my land.

It turned out our street was having a genuine non-political power outage. I felt privileged. I have been expecting power cuts for some time, and there are candles arranged on most of my shelves ready to light up my life.

I am most particular about placing boxes of matches at easily groped positions about the house. In normal years we have had power cuts after each shower of rain.

It seems the insulation material they use here in the south dissolves in water.

With the recent drought, however, the lights have stayed on. It rained during Sunday night and darkness fell upon the face of the Earth, so we seem to be back to normal.

Monday’s power outage lasted longer than usual and reminded me that not all progress was necessarily good. Long ago, I was an enthusiastic woodworker and built most of the furniture in my house using simple hand tools – saws, planes and brace-and-bit drills.

When I entered my workshop on Monday I realised I could do none of that today.

The two remaining hand-saws were rusted beyond use and my hand drill had been stolen years ago.

Without electricity I could no longer cut a plank to size or even drill a screw hole.

I’m not placing too much faith in Eskom’s reliability now that the votes have been counted, so I’ll be wandering down to the second-hand shops soon to see whether there are any old-fashioned hand tools on offer. (I might buy a manual typewriter and a carrier pigeon too, if I’m to keep writing this column.)

With a workshop of antique tools and a house full of candles I’ll be all set to march boldly ahead. Watch out, 1950, here I come!

If I move the scooter over and install a feed stall there might even be room for a horse in my garage.

On the subject of electricity, I have a problem.

I have discarded all the old incandescent globes in my house and replaced them with LED bulbs. The old lamps used at least 60 watts of power each. The new ones use about 5 watts each.

Let’s assume I have 10 lights on at any time. That would have required 600 watts of power. The same 10 lamps should now use about 50 watts of power – a twelfth of the previous amount. Why is my electricity bill higher than it was in the bad old days of Edison’s globes?

Am I still contributing towards the Gupta family trust? Last Laugh

A clothing store received a message which said: “Dear Sirs, please cancel the order I sent you last week for a size 44 maternity dress. My delivery was faster than yours.”