Electricity is like continence – you don’t miss it until it’s gone, and when it vanishes, life turns to shit.

This morning at 2 a.m. our electricity switched off. Abby and I were woken by the sound of our alarm system screeching to tell us that something dire had gone wrong. I was out of bed and crashing through the lounge, stark-naked by the time I realised that I couldn’t see anything and I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing standing on the couch brandishing one of our cats like an AK-47.

“What the f..?” I stood for a moment, confused (although not as confused as the cat, who gave a tentative meow to ask if it would be okay if we stopped playing and went back to bed now). Anyway, there wasn’t anything we could do except turn the alarm warning off and go back to sleep.

This morning, when we woke up to go to work, I switched on the bathroom lights, chuckled ruefully when they didn’t work. Then I went in and cleaned my teeth. When I came back out into the bedroom it was still dark, so I switched on the bedroom light and then chuckled ruefully because that didn’t work either. Then I went through to the kitchen to get breakfast, switched on the light, and hey! What do you know? It didn’t work. By now the rueful chuckle had become an annoyed grimace.

Then came the garage door saga.

Our garage doors didn’t come in a cardboard box, but if they had, it would have said in big red letters on the side: WARNING! Needs electricity to work!

So now, Abby and I are already late for work, stressed at sleep interruption and slowed down by cunning light switches; an innate object that somehow outwitted us humans. So much for humans being the last word in evolutionary intelligence!

Yes, you know the story – We had to manually unlatch the doors from their electric pulley mechanism whatchamacallit. Easy. Getting it back in again? Not so much.

Our doors are heavy, and they are normally attached very tightly to the cable. Getting them to hook back on without the electrical motor to help is very nearly impossible. After much shouting, cursing and hammering at the door…

The electricity came back on.

The garage doors swung open with a sort of amused aplomb, as if to say, “look – see how easy it is when you know how?” With order restored to our world, Abby and I kissed each other goodbye and headed off to work.

I’ll think about this experience next time I leave the heater on when I go out… There’s only so much coal left in the world…