Lights out- At Home

Our electricity went off last week and with it, went any lingering intelligence carried over from my youth.

In fairness, the electricity doesn’t go out that often in our house and so perhaps my befuddlement was linked to the novelty of the situation.

Luckily, we had just finished having dinner when the outage arrived and when darkness descended, I was in the process of washing up at the sink. To my temporary credit, I immediately realised what had happened. But the credit ends there.

First off, I pulled the phone out of my pocket and illuminated the torch. I knew we had some candles in one of the kitchen cupboards and so I went there first.

After lighting a few tea-lights, I realised candle holders were in short supply and so I went to the recycling bin looking for a wine bottle to make do. This was when my bafflement began.

I was using my phone again to navigate in the dark and I noticed that the battery was in the red.

“Ship,” I says to meself. “This phone isn’t going to last.”

And so for a good minute – at least a minute – I walked around the house looking for a charger to plug the phone in.

“Duh!” I said aloud, when I finally found the charger and my brain slouched into gear that a charger without electricity wasn’t going to do jack.

Sighing in my quiet stupidity, I returned to the quest for a wine bottle-candle holder.

Soon enough, via two wine bottles, two candle holders and an army of tea lights, the house was bathed in a golden hue and in the absence of TVs and tablets and any background noise, the place somehow felt calmer and more homely. I imagined this was how life was, before the advent of electricity and I wondered if it something we should start doing on a regular basis.

Evening swung into night and soon it was supper time for the smallest member of the clan.

“Do you want toast or cornflakes?” I asked Anna.

“Toast.”

I actually crossed to the food press, retrieved a loaf of bread and put a slice into the toaster and pressed down on the mechanism before I realised that the TOASTER WON’T WORK WITHOUT ELECTRICITY, DIP-SHIP! Sighing again with latent imbecility, I informed Anna that she would be having the aforementioned cornies.

Still, the soft, relaxed atmosphere in the house provided a balm for my forgetfulness and I pottered around lighting yet more candles until the house looked like a Police music video.

I had been kicking myself too because I was recently in receipt of a large quantity of beeswax and I had been intending to make my own candles for the past couple of months. For whatever reason (work, weans, life in general), this didn’t happen and so, sitting in the kitchen surrounded by candles I thought, “No better time than the present.”

Making basic beeswax candles is deceptively easy and all it requires is a melting of the wax followed by a decanting into small glasses or jars.

“No bother to me.”

Blinded, it seemed, by congenital stupidity, I cracked out a saucepan and laid it on the hob. But of course, the hob wasn’t working because – hello, Michael? – the electricity is off.

Heaving another great sigh, I sat up on a kitchen stool and at that moment, the lights came on.

Did I make the candles? Did I hell. I switched on the TV and lay up on the sofa.

Thinking back on this triumvirate of stupefactions, I can’t help but think we could all do with switching things off on a more regular basis. At the very least, it might teach us not to be so reliant on the invisible power source circulating through our homes.

On with the electricity programming! Very quickly, cause I’m running out of space, Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby (Tuesday at 8pm on BBC2)…

Monica Galetti and Giles Coren visit ION Adventure Hotel in Iceland, a design hotel levitating out from a dormant volcano.

Or, Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country (Tuesday at 8pm on Channel4)…

Documentary continuing the real-life adventures of property expert Sarah Beeny, her husband Graham Swift and their four sons after quitting their lives in London to start anew at a former dairy farm in Somerset.

And lastly, You Don’t Know Me (Sunday at 9pm on BBC1)…

Drama based on Imran Mahmood’s novel about a man standing trial for murder who fires his barrister during the court case, in favour of representing himself in court.

Right, I’m away to make some candles.