Powered into action as dreaded outage looms

Please read this quickly because that’s how I’m writing it, as the electricity is about to be cut off.

A planned outage is what the power company calls it, as opposed to an unplanned outage which I prefer. An unplanned outage happens and I deal with it. A planned outage looms and I dread it. I think of all the things I won’t be able to do, prime among which is to write. Which is absurd.

People have written for thousands of years, with chisels on stone, quills on parchment, ink on paper. But I’ve got used to writing with keyboard on screen, thus forsaking a free and simple mechanical process that I understand, in favour of one that I do not understand and that makes me dependent on a supply of electricity and a computer.

(But at least I am not yet dependent on my phone. I was at the university the other day and I crossed a concourse where young people abounded, with their fresh faces and rubber spines and all the advantages of youth that you don’t know are advantages until you haven’t got them, and I looked about me and I swear I was the only person of the thousand or so that I could see who was not cradling a cellphone, crooning to it, stroking it, using it to mediate between themselves and the actual world. What power has been granted to those demonic little things. I suspect we are sleepwalking towards the cliff of catastrophe. But then again, history shows that people my age have always imagined we are sleepwalking towards the cliff of catastrophe, and generally speaking we avoid stepping off it. But, we shall see. Or others will, at least.)

The power outage is scheduled to start at 8.30am. Most days at 8.30am I am eating electrically-cooked toast and drinking electrically-heated coffee and reading the paper by electrically-produced light, but because of the promised outage I’ve had toast and coffee already and am at my desk.

It’s an odd feeling, knowing that the power is going to cut off in 45 minutes or so. It’s like knowing one’s date of death. "Depend upon it sir," said Dr Johnson, "when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." But my mind isn’t concentrated at all. It keeps wandering ahead to things I might do before the power fizzles.

I could, for example, boil some water and put it in thermos flasks in order to make coffee with it later, but if I have any thermos flasks they’re somewhere in the garage and it would be quicker to go out and buy coffee than to look for them. Also in the garage there may be a gas camping stove on which I could cook a bit of lunch, but a dim memory whispers that I may have lent it to someone who has yet to return it (and after this length of time won’t). I’d like to run the washing machine but I don’t want to be left with a half-washed load and I suspect the cycle takes longer than the — checks watch — 28 minutes I have before the world ends.

Logically considered, knowing one’s date of death shouldn’t make much difference. We all know we’re mortal. We can all name a date that we’ll definitely be gone by. So being a bit more precise about it should change nothing. Yet it would change everything. The certainty of the terminus, the date ringed in the diary after which all the other pages would be blank, would render whatever time was left somehow pointless. Why bother to do anything? It will come to the same nullity.

So shall I just sit here and hum to myself while I wait for the end of power? Or shall I try, despite myself, to do a little good, on the principle of "let me do it now and not defer it, for I shall not pass this way again." But what good could I do in — checks watch again and gulps — nine paltry minutes?

Well now, at that point I gave up and made myself a coffee while I still could and sat and sipped and awaited my fate. I watched the clock on the oven tick over to 8.30. The axe did not fall. The clock stayed alight. I felt vexed. Doom advertised should be doom delivered. It is now 8.52 and I’ve still got power. It’s not right. If the outage hasn’t started by nine I’m going to ring up and comp