In the past twenty-four hours I have had a taste of what it is going to be like living in Britain in another twenty or thirty years, as we complete our descent from World Power to not quite first world country, one which to boot is being strangled by bureaucracy, and failed to invest enough in its electricity generation capacity.
We heard back from Kent Blaxill yesterday about the window. They apologised for the delay, but the man dealing with it had been on holiday. The bad news was that they could not replace our double glazed unit with laminated glass, not without building consent, because it entailed such a theoretically large downgrade to the thermal efficiency of the house. Building consent was almost never given in such circumstances.
The house was designed and built in the 1960s. When we bought it, it had single glazing throughout. If we had never installed double glazing and now wanted to replace single glazing with more single glazing, we'd be allowed to. If we were prepared to spend the next twenty years looking out at the garden through the increasingly foggy and thermally inefficient failed double glazing unit, we'd be allowed to do that too. The Systems Administrator could put a pickaxe through the window and we could live with a large hole in the side of the house, or board it up ourselves, and the authorities would have no say in the matter. A double glazed unit will not save us the £200 to £400 a year in heating bills that it will cost us in depreciation, given the life span of previous outsize units in that position. It will almost certainly not recoup the carbon cost of its manufacture and installation in reduced emissions attributable to heating our house, before it fails again. But Big State says we have to have double glazing. It's the reintroduction of the windows tax by the back door. I'll make enquiries of the council about this building consent, what it is, and whether I can have it, but I'm not hopeful.
This morning the Systems Administrator heard back from the garage about the posh car, which is in for its MoT. It is an elderly jag, bought when the SA was still a master of the universe, and when something really expensive to fix finally goes wrong that will be end of that, and the SA will have to do long distances in a small Skoda like thousands of other people do. This MoT has not thrown up anything terminal, but the headlight wipers do not work. They have never worked, and road safety in Britain has not been compromised by the fact that the SA has been driving around in a car with two tiny, inoperable flaps of metal attached beneath the headlights. The MoT rules now state that headlight wipers, if fitted, have to work. You don't have to have them. I don't have them, you probably don't have them. Most cars don't have them. But if you do have them, they must work. The garage bill will thus be inflated by the time it takes to get the wipers to work, or remove them and blank off the holes where they were mounted.
That was a mere starter, an amuse-bouche, before this afternoon's main event. It rained today. I didn't mind that too much, the garden needs the rain, and I had fortunately just inspected the last frame of the final beehive before it started, though I didn't manage to remove a few frames of honey I was planning to take with me. Not to worry, I was going to make strawberry ice cream, and use the left over egg whites in some meringues and macaroons. And do supper, because the SA didn't want to go out food shopping because of waiting around for news from the garage. I went to Tesco, and bought strawberries (best before 31 July, which is tomorrow, when I am going to London. That is relevant.) and chicken thighs, and yogurt, with the intention of making Moghul style kebabs, to be served with pea and potato fritters and spicy tomato relish. The SA was going to watch Glorious Goodwood on the TV (I really thought that was with vintage cars, and was very surprised at lunchtime when the SA mentioned horses).
It was all going swimmingly well by mid afternoon, the spicy tomato mixture was bubbling away, and I'd just liquidised the onion for the second stage of the chicken marinade, with Moondog's Sidewalk Dances (a new acquisition the SA is not overly keen on) blasting away on the iPod docking station (I hate earphones). We'd had 9 millimetres of steady rain for the garden, and all was well with the world (apart from the window problem). Then Moondog came to an abrupt halt and the lights went out. I went to see whether Goodwood was still Glorious on the TV and if I had merely lost the kitchen circuit, and met the SA coming the other way down the hall. The external supply had failed, not our fuse box. That brought my cooking plans to a stuttering halt. I couldn't make meringues or macaroons, or at least not without more physical effort than I was willing to expend, because I couldn't use the electric whisk. I was reluctant to make the custard anyway, given that I didn't know how long the fridge would be out, and egg custard is not good stuff to have hanging around at room temperature in July.
The SA thought my view on the custard a little pessimistic. There was nothing in the local media about power cuts, but after a while the electricity company website acknowledged that there was a fault in CO7, expected to be fixed by 19.32. Half past seven. It went off at half past three. I chopped up the ginger and garlic to go in the pea and potato cakes by hand, since I couldn't use the liquidiser. The SA decided it would be prudent to ration battery use on laptop and tablet. My laptop won't do more than ten minutes unless it is plugged into the mains, but I switched my phone off. Half past seven came and went, and the time for fixing the fault was revised to 21.32. Half past nine. There was still nothing about it in the East Anglian Daily Times, the Essex County Standard or the Colchester Gazette, though the electricity company did offer a premium rate phone number you could ring.
I began to fry the potato cakes and roast the kebabs in the gradually failing Aga. It's an electric Aga, and while the core still held massive reserves of heat, the electric fan that circulates heat from the core to the ovens was not running. After half an hour of cooking, at half past eight, the SA suggested it might be sensible to take the kebabs off their skewers, and fry them instead, since the hot plate above the core would be much hotter than the theoretically hot oven was, deprived of its fan. I dismantled them, feeling distinctly unimpressed, since I'd gone to all that trouble finding the packet of bamboo skewers buried in the back of a kitchen drawer, and everything. They tasted nice, as did the potato cakes, and the chutney, but it wasn't the effect I'd been aiming at.
At 21.32 the power came back on. That's six hours arbitrarily spent with no laptop, no lights, no ice cream machine, no Kitchenaid, no iPod, no TV, a strictly rationed tablet and laptop, and half a cooker, and both of our plans for the afternoon blasted out of the water, leaving me with two punnets of date-expiring strawberries and no convenient time to use them. We only had internet on the rationed laptop because the SA has a dongle for emergencies. If there had been ferocious thunderstorms over Essex, or it were the middle of winter with heavy snow, I could forgive the power company more easily, but a calm day in July? For six hours? We could hear the generators running down at the lettuce farm. I'm irritated enough about the strawberries, so imagine having thousands of lettuces cut and waiting to be processed and go out to the supermarkets, when the power to your processing line and chiller units goes off for what turns out to be six hours, with no sensible information on when it is going to come on again.
This is just the beginning. Given the shambles which is UK energy policy, it will be the new normal, given a few more years.
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