Lots of people have helped my wife & I get through the rewire. We’re very grateful to all of you. The work is now complete and we hope shortly to be issuing cake and electrics party invites. I can’t pretend to have enjoyed any of it but I don’t need to tell you that, I’ve worn my discomfort openly. I suppose most people would grin and bear it, as if they enjoyed climbing into tiny filthy cavities and being perpetually injured. The worst of it was at the beginning with no heating or hot water. My evenings around the hearth cast long shadows and then none at all after it went on fire itself. This unfortunate start percolated into most of the rest which followed.
Along the way, my camera has broken, so I can’t dish up the long anticipated finished shots. Mind you, nothing looks that completed. You can’t see a safe electrical installation – it’s the ones which you can see which are likely to cause problems.
In an age when we’ve become very used to just turning something off and back on again to make it work properly, we’d do well to remember that all these machines still depend on something which few of us understand: steam power. Despite giving various names to the technologies we use to create electricity, all of them are still rooted in the steam age. We turn water to steam, to drive pistons, to create this useful force. We often comment that without electricity, our lives would become very difficult to live, very quickly. So few of us have both the skills and resources to survive such an ordeal, social breakdown would seem inevitable. We’re not just accustomed to power at the flick of a switch, we’re dependent on it.
This dependency turns us into addicts for the means to make the steam we need. Like most junkies, we don’t care about the quality of the means to our highs, so long as we obtain electrical comfort. Consequently, we poison our planet. We carbonise the atmosphere and irradiate our soils and waters. Although we have the means to resolve these secondly problems, our society seems blind to their urgency. The steam has got in our eyes.