Powerless

We were late this morning.

It is Sunday, but it was a normal working day, the way they all are at the moment, and so the alarm was set for seven.

It did not go ring.

It does not ring anyway. It is one of those radio things that is supposed to wake you up with the gentle tones of the Today Programme, so that you can start the day feeling worried before your eyes even come open. The radio has long stopped finding any stations, however, and now it wakes us up with a horrible deafening in-between-stations crackle.

Unpleasant as this is, it generally works, until today. Today we woke up at half past seven to find that all the electricity was off and the alarm clock was no longer functional.

So much for modern technology. The grandfather clock works no matter what is going on anywhere else in the world.

To my mystification, a couple of moments later my phone dinged with a texted apology from the Water Board telling me that all of our water had been turned off and we might only get a dirty trickle if we were lucky.

I turned on the kitchen tap experimentally, but there was just as much water as usual, although it still isn’t hot.

I don’t know where the Water Board got my phone number, anyway. Maybe they meant to say ‘electricity’ and their predictive text got it wrong. That sort of thing happens to me all the time.

We were late, but it didn’t matter very much, and Mark said that he would just work half an hour later this evening, so that was all right.

Obviously being late made everything wrong again, and I flapped about the kitchen forgetting what I had already put in Mark’s bag until eventually he buzzed off, and I could call the Peppers and take the dogs off to be emptied in the park.

When we came back Roger would not come home with me. He has taken to spending his days with the Peppers lately. I thought at first this was because of his love affair with Pepper herself, but her owners explained that it was more likely to be because they share their breakfast with the dogs, and actually what he is doing is sloping off for Second Breakfast followed by a snooze on their sofa.

His father was not at all sorry to see the back of him, and stretched out blissfully on their now unoccupied cushion in front of the fire.

I worried a bit about the water, because of the washing machine, but it continued to gush unabated, and the electricity had recovered itself, so all was well.

I carried on with the painting, and got so absorbed that I completely forgot to hang the washing out, and remembered in a flap somewhere around lunchtime.

Obviously after that there was not enough day left, and in the pale winter sunshine it did not dry properly. This was tiresome, because it was our sheets, and I would like to sleep between them tonight. In the end I draped them all around the stove before I went to work, and every now and again I am having a quiet worry in case the house is aflame, caused by an overheated sheet.

When the Peppers win the lottery we will get some insurance.

They came across for a cup of coffee and to return Roger this afternoon, and we had a planning meeting about their lottery numbers. These have been rubbish so far, and we thought that perhaps a new strategy was called for.

We have put down all of our birthdays, including Roger Poopy’s, which is bound to be a winning formula.

I bet nobody has ever thought of that before.