General Natter Room

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Anita Bensoussane
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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

We had a power cut for an hour and a half earlier this evening. I'd just finished cooking a roast chicken dinner so we ate it by candlelight. It felt very "1970s" as there were a lot of power cuts back then! We chatted about past power cuts (we had quite a few in the first decade of the new millennium), remembering how we read ghost stories and Sherlock Holmes tales by candlelight, used torches to flash messages to one another in Morse code and played board games by candlelight. Power cuts can be a nuisance but I must admit I like the smell of the candles and the cosy glow and flicker of the flames.
"Heyho for a starry night and a heathery bed!" - Jack, The Secret Island.

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Re: General Natter Room

Post by sixret »

A cosy description provided you are not alone! :lol:
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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Katharine »

I remember the 1970s power cuts, two in particular. One was the day my family moved house. For years I just had a vague memory of my brother and myself sitting in the dark while the adults moved furniture out. I thought I'd mis-remembered it as being so dark, until discussing it with the family one day, I found out that there had actually been a power cut on moving day, and so they'd had to shift everything by candle light! The other memory was probably a couple of years later, and my brother was having a birthday party when the lights went out. We had a coal fire, so the room probably didn't go completely dark, and Mum had candles to hand anyway, plus those on the cake of course. :D
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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Courtenay »

Lovely evocative description, Anita. We had quite a few power cuts in our town when I was little during the 1980s and early '90s — I always thought it was quite fun getting the candles out, but I don't think there were any times it lasted long enough for it to interfere with cooking our dinner. (If all else had failed, we had a wood burner with a flat top, which we could potentially have used as a makeshift stove, but we never had to.) I do remember one time when the power was out, our cat jumped onto the kitchen countertop and managed to singe her tail slightly as she waved it through one of the candles!
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Anita Bensoussane
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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

Interesting memories, Katharine and Courtenay. Luckily our cooker is a gas cooker so I could have carried on cooking the dinner if the power cut had started earlier - though as it happened I had just finished dishing up the food when the lights went out.
"Heyho for a starry night and a heathery bed!" - Jack, The Secret Island.

"There is no bond like the bond of having read and liked the same books."
- E. Nesbit, The Wonderful Garden.


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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Rob Houghton »

I remember having a lot of powercuts in the 1970's when I was a kid - but most weren't due to strikes, but to the fact that our houses were supplied by cables hanging from poles across the canal at the back of our houses. When the wind blew sometimes the cables would come down or clash together, or sometimes they were weighted with snow. We had a lot of powercuts due to this, until the power-lines were put into a pipe at the end of the 1970's.

I always found it very exciting, eating dinner by candlelight and being allowed to go to bed with a candle felt quite 'romantic' and old-fashioned. As a big fan of the story 'Connie's Curious Candle' I strongly identified with taking my candle up to bed! :-D
'Oh voice of Spring of Youth
hearts mad delight,
Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
I'll warm me with your echoes
through the night.'

(E. Blyton, Sunday Times, 1951)



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Anita Bensoussane
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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

I thought of 'Connie's Curious Candle' last night as we had four candles together on the table! Ours were all white though - not red, green, blue and yellow!
"Heyho for a starry night and a heathery bed!" - Jack, The Secret Island.

"There is no bond like the bond of having read and liked the same books."
- E. Nesbit, The Wonderful Garden.


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Re: General Natter Room

Post by sixret »

There’s no stopping you for doing just that, Rob. :wink:
I stand with justice and the truth. Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.

Learn the history. Do research.

The hypocrisy, double standard, prejudice and bigotry own by some people is so obvious.Shame on them!
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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Courtenay »

Anita Bensoussane wrote:I thought of 'Connie's Curious Candle' last night as we had four candles together on the table!
Four candles? Nah, fork 'andles... :wink: :wink: (couldn't resist, sorry)

We occasionally did have power cuts that lasted into the night when I was little, but there was definitely no taking candles into bedrooms in our house — we used a torch if we needed to. Mum was too wary of us potentially burning the place down!! :shock:
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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Rob Houghton »

I know my parents kept an eye on us, and anyway they were only placed on my bedside table for a few minutes before being blown out. :-D We often played with candles when we were kids, though, as my friend Dawn from next door often used to make dolls houses out of cardboard boxes from the supermarket and light them with birthday cake candles! I think that was probably more hazardous than using proper ones indoors! Mind you, the cardboard box houses were usually outside on our lawn and a bucket of water was always not far off! :lol: I can also remember us lighting small bonfires on the 'bonfire patch' on the strip of land between our house and the canal, where we always had fires, and aged about 12 or 13 I was allowed to light fireworks when it was bonfire night.

We also used to wire bulbs to batteries to light the houses sometimes (my dad being an electrician, there were always those big batteries with 'springs' on the top, which were easy to twist wires round) and I could use proper sharp-ended scissors long before anyone else at school because I was used to using my mom's big scissors at home. We also used to climb up the big 'A Frames' at junior school without any mats underneath! Life in the 1970's lol! :-D :lol:
'Oh voice of Spring of Youth
hearts mad delight,
Sing on, sing on, and when the sun is gone
I'll warm me with your echoes
through the night.'

(E. Blyton, Sunday Times, 1951)



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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Darrell71 »

We have power cuts here so frequently that almost all houses invest in a backup generator, because we'd probably have to stay in the dark every Thursday night otherwise. :lol: :x
But the generator runs on batteries that are charged when there is power, so if there are cuts too frequently, as is sometimes the case in the monsoon, the generator runs out of power soon too. But that barely happens once a year. :D
However, I do remember a time a few years ago when there was some sort of major problem with the power supply of the entire neighborhood, and we didn't have power after 6 pm till 11 am the next day for what seemed like days. It was great fun, we used to light all the tea light candles and bathe the room in flickering shadows, and bedtime was rather late a few times, because we just lay about in the living room chatting about random things. I remember a particular weekend when everyone in the entire lane, (it's comprised of several apartment buildings around three or 4 storeys high), and the neighboring lane, gathered on the terraces of their respective buildings, lit candles, brought up food, and just talked to one another across the street (it's a quiet one lane dead end affair) or gazed at the stars,which you could see more of than usual. We kids would dart down for a while, wander around, go up to someone else's terrace to sample the food there, and then come back to our own one. There's a system of smallish hills that starts from the end of our lane, so it wasn't really a 'middle of the city' feel. I don't think anyone went to bed till 2 am that night. It only lasted around two weeks though, then the problem was fixed and we were back to our usual routines in brightly lit rooms. This was around 2014 or so, nothing quite like it has happened since. :(
Rob Houghton wrote:I remember having a lot of powercuts in the 1970's when I was a kid - but most weren't due to strikes, but to the fact that our houses were supplied by cables hanging from poles across the canal at the back of our houses. When the wind blew sometimes the cables would come down or clash together, or sometimes they were weighted with snow.
We have 3 high tension (I don't remember the exact wattage, but it's really high) cables running through our lane (and of course they had to be at the level of our home :roll: ), and up until two years ago we used to have several smaller ones running above them perpendicularly across, and the smaller ones aren't particularly taut either. It's a really dangerous system, but they've fixed it now. But two years ago, in a storm, with the wind howling around, one of the smaller wires was flung around so violently that it touched two of the high tension cables at the same time, and well, you can guess what happened next. We were all poised near the window (but ready to run) watching in fear and astonishment, my dad desperately trying to call the authorities, when it happened. There was a HUGE boom, the windows shook, we all turned away on reflex, and the unfortunate wire lay snapped in two, severed ends trailing across the street below, one end tied to the top of our building, the other end disappearing off God knows where. It was frankly terrifying, and could have been so much worse. Thankfully now the overhead wires are all passed through a different route, but seriously, it took them long enough to realize that. :roll:
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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Darrell71 »

Rob Houghton wrote:We also used to climb up the big 'A Frames' at junior school without any mats underneath! Life in the 1970's lol! :-D :lol:
Our entire class of 40 once sat on top of a bus (on the luggage rack, there were railings, but less than a foot high. :lol: ), rode around an hour, got off near a lake, (which could potentially have been deep and contained, i dunno, snakes or whatever), had a nice long swim, climbed on top of the the bus again, now with the afternoon sun to dry us, and rode again for an hour or so before we reluctantly had to go inside before the start of the expressway. :lol:
We've ridden in the back of tempos (pick up trucks of sorts) more times than I can count.
Me and a few friends once climbed out of a fourth storey window with an unprotected drop to the ground, monkeyed around with our legs on a ledge and our ands grasping another ledge, and climbed into another window on a different side of the building. All of this, in the rain.

Our school was different and weird, and we did the craziest things, but honestly, it gave me some of the best memories of my life. I'd do all of that again in a second (except the climbing out and walking on narrow ledges thing, it was reckless, dangerous and stupid on so many levels), and there's honestly so much more crazy stuff that I'd love to tell you all some day. :D :lol:
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Anita Bensoussane
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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Anita Bensoussane »

Courtenay wrote:
Anita Bensoussane wrote:I thought of 'Connie's Curious Candle' last night as we had four candles together on the table!
Four candles? Nah, fork 'andles... :wink: :wink: (couldn't resist, sorry)
:lol: :lol: :lol:

It's great reading people's stories of power cuts, candles, etc.

Funnily enough, at work today I was listening to some children read and one of them happened to choose a book called The Power Cut! (The child doesn't live in my area and didn't have a power cut yesterday).
"Heyho for a starry night and a heathery bed!" - Jack, The Secret Island.

"There is no bond like the bond of having read and liked the same books."
- E. Nesbit, The Wonderful Garden.


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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Wolfgang »

Anita Bensoussane wrote:We had a power cut for an hour and a half earlier this evening. I'd just finished cooking a roast chicken dinner so we ate it by candlelight.
I suppose that would have made many people jealous, considering that many people pay to have a candlelight dinner ;-).
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Re: General Natter Room

Post by Courtenay »

:lol: Good point! :wink:
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