Shine a light in the dark

There’s something beautiful about candlelight, about having 20 odd candles around the room all lit and scattering shadows on the wall. It’s beautiful and cosy and comforting in a way. It’s nice to curl up on the couch with your signficant other as the light from the flames dance across the walls.

It’s bloody rubbish for reading by, I can tell you. And cooking by as well. We had a power cut last night. Apparently, 100,000 homes went out and so did the Metro system. Can you imagine this happening in London? We’d have seen it on the news for weeks afterwards – the terrible traumas of people whose only light was a few candles for 4 hours, who had no idea what had happened or when their electricity would return. There’d have been tantrums about the Tube disappearing for an hour during rush hour, about people missing Eastenders and not being able to buy something off ebay. There’d have been recriminations about whose fault it was, who had cut the cable (or whatever had gone wrong) What do we get? Second story on the local news. Second?! Not even first, which was about how it had rained in Carlisle (doesn’t it always) and there’d been a bit of flooding in the roads. I doubt that even made the national news either. Sometimes I wonder if the north has been annexed and is an entirely different country. Maybe as well be, the way the meeja treats us at times.

Yes, we lost power last night. Apparently one dodgy cable had the power (or not, ha ha!) to plunge 100,000 homes into darkness and bring the metro to a grinding halt in rush hour. I find this difficult to believe. Most people were up and running again by 6:30, after an hour. We had till wait until 9:30 last night and then I had to sit up and wait for my washing machine to finally finish. I felt all off kilter all evening as I’d been halfway through my yoga tape at the time and wasn’t stretched properly (and don’t watch it enough to be able to remember a single further exercise so I couldn’t even carry on)

It was fun for a while, a novelty. Duncan finally got home at 7 and we cooked dinner together with the torch (thank god for gas cookers!) and ate by candlelight. We chatted for a while about our day, played 20 questions, I spy and had fun. But, by 9, we were quiet, running out of things to say. Which made me worry. Shouldn’t we have loads to talk about? We’re married, spending the rest of our lives together and we’ve run out of things to say by 9pm? Why have I never noticed this before? Is this something I should be worrying about? We sat in companionable silence until the lights came on and the evening routine started again.

But I couldn’t shake the questions. Shouldn’t we have loads to say to each other? Shouldn’t we be able to fill an evening by chatting to each other. It’s not that I was bored of him, I just didn’t have anything else to say. There’s only so many times I can relate my day of subtitling CSI Miami followed by Kevin Hill. It’s not exciting. So does that make me boring, the fact that most evenings, we sit watching TV or reading or playing on the pc. We’re perfectly happy this way but are we perfectly normal?

Until there is a next time..

xx