The forecasts on the radio are growing increasingly apocalyptic. Another ‘great storm’ is coming! The ‘hurricane’ of October 1987 is mentioned repeatedly, and the radio presenters are nearly breathless in their excitement, speaking as if they have biblical powers of terrible prophecy. But yes, here where the mountains meet the sea in north-west Wales, the winds are definitely building up to gale force, there are tree branches strewn across the road now, which I gingerly drive around. I’ve almost reached my destination. I turn up the track to the last gate, and as I open it, I see gusts of birds are being blown in from the sea, surely early warning signals of what’s to come …
*
Living in a Western city – especially a megalopolis like London – you often feel cut off from the harsher impacts of the elements. It takes a considerable effort of imagination to really believe that the weather causes chaos and takes lives. In the city, snow comes perhaps once every three or four years – and, even then, it’s polite snow. It arrives gently, usually at night, not wanting to disturb anyone, and melts away (often within twenty-four hours) without having caused any real problems. In fact, quite the opposite. If schools are closed, not only is this a liberation for the children, but, I’ve often thought, observing parents playing in snowbound London parks, how much they too – freed from their routines for a day – must see life differently with the coming of a white-out of the skies. A chance to start again. In the city you’re also sheltered from rising waters. The wildest storms in London rarely seem to uproot a single tree.
In the winter you learn to listen, with the detachment the landlubber gives to the shipping forecast, to news of remote villages in Cumbria being cut off by snowdrifts, or settlements in Somerset being inundated by floods. Very occasionally a particular incident might affect you directly if you venture outside the security of the city – the bad luck of a fallen tree, or a waterlogged road perhaps – but most of the time we barely register the human distress that comes with power cuts or floods. ‘Thousands of homes are still without power this evening’ becomes a kind of comforting background music in the winter, which has the unintended side effect of making city-dwellers subconsciously shiver, and sink deeper under their duvets with a shudder of relief. The familiarity of these words, reaching back to childhood – ‘Irish Sea, seven rising to eight, visibility poor; Rockall, eight, occasionally nine, severe, rising …’
*
I’m writing these words by candlelight. Two tall candles shivering in an unfamiliar room by the estuary here. On the late news, coming from my little silver radio, a man’s voice from London, deep and reassuring, tells me that ‘41,000 homes in Wales and the West of England remain without electricity tonight. The energy companies have said they are doing all they can to reconnect power supplies.’ It is a strange sensation to feel included in the news for once. No longer the detached metropolitan listener, now I’m one of the 41,000. I catch myself thinking, rather bizarrely, of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a garishly illustrated pamphlet I once read as a boy, which very precisely described that only 44,000 were chosen for salvation. It seemed an extremely arbitary number, and though absurd in one way, in the context of the 1970s and the wishy-washy ‘religion lite’ I’d grown up with, I recall grudgingly admiring the chutzpah of actually putting a figure on the afterlife. But 41,000 is a little short of this figure – though still enough to fill a football stadium. A certain sense of being in a select group tonight. Select in our shared discomfort, in our sudden anxieties about torch batteries and candles. An abstract solidarity across the dark mountains with faces unknown.
I arrived two hours ago, the winds pounding the car as I pulled up by the cottage. My relief at having just made it, having arrived just in time to batten down the hatches before the storm strengthens. I switch on my torch and scuttle over to the house. My hand feels for the key under the heavy stone in the porch. I unlock the door, the keen, damp smell of an empty stone house in winter. Then automatically clicking the light switches in the hall. Nothing. Oh shit. I check the fuse box with my torch, no tripped circuits. Then switch everything off, and on again. Still darkness. I walk into the little kitchen, and then, with my beam of light, I see an entire socket has been blown out, charring the wall, and sending plastic shards across the floor. Maybe a lightning strike? And there’s another burnt-out socket, down the steps in the sitting room. Damn. I thought the challenge today would be just getting here before the really wild weather took hold, but now, exhausted after the drive, I’m faced by another set of difficulties. A freezing house, no electricity, no hot water, not very helpful for my incubating cold. And then I suddenly recall what the woman said this evening – Megan’s still away. Of course, why didn’t I think of this before? Presumably nobody’s staying in her cottage up the hill – not in February, surely? I remember she once showed me the secret way in, via the adjoining woodshed at the side of the house. The upturned old wooden boat that disguised the disused entrance to the kitchen. That must be worth a try …
As I shut the house up again, the winds pick up, and with them, rain coming down now in almost horizontal sheets. I hurry to the car, and drive back up the track, zigzagging the few hundred yards up to Megan’s cottage, just below the brow of the hill. Pulling a coat over my head I make a dash for the woodshed, pull the door open, and head for the wall where the boat’s hull appears in my torch beam. I duck behind it, and then reach for the ancient latch, and, with enormous relief, I hear the soft click as the door opens, with a little sigh of resistance. The sanctuary of the cottage. My torch now picks out the familiar features of Megan’s kitchen. Refuge at last. I click the light switch. But, for the second time this evening, nothing happens. Maddening. Especially as I can now see the lights of the distant village on the other side of the estuary. I walk outside, up to the top of the hill, pushing against the winds that are increasing by the minute, and sure enough, on this side all is dark. All the way from Ffestiniog, down to Harlech, everything folded into the darkness, every village, every farmhouse. Oh well, nothing to be done tonight. And at least Megan’s place has a woodburner, so I can get one room warm, I can heat food on top and boil a pan of water for coffee in the morning.
Power cut. Simply a reality of existence for perhaps the majority of people on this planet – at least those fortunate enough to have electricity at all. A daily, or weekly, occurrence to be worked around. But for those of us who live in what used to be called the ‘developed world’, who are so habituated to feeling in control of our environments, it comes as a visceral shock. We don’t really know what to do, we have few points of reference. Our first instinct to reach for the phone, trying to keep our sense of outrage in check. Why?! When? How long? How am I supposed to …?! Impossible! For those over forty there may be a distant memory of the miners’ strikes of the early 1970s which ended Heath’s government. The three-day week, flying pickets, eating by candlelight, paraffin heaters … But this all seems so long ago, literally another century, when organised labour was still powerful. It seems absurd in our time to be without electricity. To be powerless.
I find myself thinking back to the most poetic project we ever did in Platform, certainly the most idealistic. A work in the early 1990s called ‘Homeland’,fn1 which asked Londoners to consider how light, that most intangible of substances, came into their city – attempting to break down the constituent elements of the coal burned for electricity, the copper wire in their electric cables, even the glass of the light bulbs they used – to trace these materials back to their points of production (the colliery at Hirwaun in south Wales, the copper mine at Neves-Corvo in Alentejo, Portugal, the light-bulb factory in Nagykanizsa, Hungary); of course, most of these now owned by vast US and UK transnational corporations such as Rio Tinto and General Electric. The philosophical jumping-off point for the project was to go beyond Adam Smith’s concept of ‘the Invisible Hand’ – we attempted something more radical, asking the question whether it was possible to humanise vastly complex systems of international trade. To establish empathy between groups of people that capitalism had historically taught us to regard as ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’. If people in a city like London could see the faces of the copper miners in Portugal or the lives of the Hungarian light-bulb makers, actually recognise their shared humanity, then many of the assumptions behind the abstract nature of international trade would have to change.