Internet cafes - again.

Tonight I'm sitting rather grumpily in an internet cafe, catching up with my email after a seven-hour power outtage at home.

I lived in England in the Seventies. I lived through the Three Day Week, the Rolling Blackouts and Industrial Action so 'ard it would crisp your socks into little nubs of wrecked nylon. I'm used to such things as e.g. making a T. Rex scrapbook with rubber glue, copies of the Daily Mirror, and scissors, all by the light of an oil lamp made from a bit of lit string dipped in a glass of cooking oil. I was once moseying around the Pyramid of Cheops when the lights went out. I know power outtages.

Both Britain and Egypt were rather apologetic and embarrassed about it. Anyway, it was thirty years ago. It's astounding to live in a supposed First World country in the 21st Century and not have any guarantee that the goddamned power will stay on for more than a few days at a time. I have UPS devices. I have battery back ups in everything. It's almost as though people expected the transformers to explode with the regularity they do in my town.

If they don't explode on their own, some tosspot crashes into them with a SUV. The earthquakes take out the others.

The formerly frozen food, the formerly refrigerated meat and vegetable and the formerly nice and warm iguanas are waiting for me to think of something to do with them, and anyway Borders is closing, so farewell.