 Drama: February 05, 2025 Issue [#12964] |
This week: On Survival Edited by: Kit  
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All of life's comforts can be stripped away in an instant... It takes just one bad storm, for example, to find yourself without heating, hot water, and the ability to cook food.
It is good, then, to be prepared. What is your best survival tip? Have you ever had to use it?
This week's Newsletter is all about making it through those difficult times.
Kit |
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On Friday, the 24th of January, Storm Éowyn caused more than 280,000 homes to lose power across Scotland. Ours was one of them.
I’d been through power cuts before. They happen. Mostly, they are fixed within the hour, and if not you just get on with your day. When it gets dark you light some candles, or navigate your way around the house with a torch. It’s not a big deal. A minor inconvenience. Except… what if it lasts for days? And it’s the middle of winter? That’s the situation we suddenly found ourselves in this time.
It was freezing outside, and the temperature in the house kept on dropping. It stabilised at around 7°C/44°C – only slightly more comfortable than living in a fridge. We have an electric cooker, so couldn’t use it. No hot water, no Internet, and for the first three days no mobile phone signal, either. We had a little camping stove – one of those wood-burning ones - but it takes ages to heat up anything on that, especially on the days of wind and rain. My poor husband once spent three hours trying to boil some water for a cuppa. He was miserable, but determined. – the man needed his coffee.
After a while the cold makes a home in your bones. You can bury yourself in as many blankets as you want, and that does help, but there’s always a part of you that’s exposed. My nose would get icy cold. And you can’t stay in bed all the time. Life still goes on. At the end of day five I was beginning to feel concerned about my health – I was definitely not well.
I felt awful for the cats, too. They had their food, and their water, and their blankets, but they felt the cold. We snuggled up with them a lot. I wondered what they thought was happening. They must have worried why their home wouldn’t get warm any longer and if this was it now, this was what it would be like, forever.
Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, but with all of the incorrect information we were provided with throughout that’s what it was beginning to feel like for me. We were one of the last homes to be reconnected. At the end of day four nobody had even been around yet to assess the situation; it was only when our neighbour found the power cable down on the floor of the wood that the company responsible for sending an engineer around actually bothered to send someone to check. Then it still took until nearly midnight the next day to fix it.
Our neighbour was better prepared than we were. In fact, he has having a jolly good time. He has a little campervan with a gas stove and he and his dog just moved in there for the duration. His sister, who lives with him, was much less impressed. I felt most sorry for the 82-year-old farmer nearby - he must really have felt the cold.
Those five days made me realise how quickly what you take for granted can be taken away from you. Most of us expect to have food and shelter, heating, hot water, and electricity. It’s what you rely on on a day-to-day basis. You flick the switch and there’s light. You step into the shower and there’s hot water. The freezer will store your food. We unfortunately had two full freezers when this happened and had to throw it all away.
It also made me realise how dependent we are on the Internet. It’s where all the information lives. Like the telephone number of the company that covers our area. Or an idea of what’s going on. Nobody’s going to knock on your door and check on you. Nobody’s going to keep you informed. Well, other than our neighbour, but his Internet was down as well.
I’m going to be much better prepared next time. I’m buying a little gas stove to cook on. More torches. A sleeping bag. I’ve stocked up on cans of soup and other items that can survive a power cut. Nothing’s perfect when it comes to having no heating when it’s freezing outside, but if it ever happens again I want to do what I can to make it less awful. A wood burning stove would be nice, but that’s a little more expensive. Something for the future, though.
At least as a writer I can use the experience in my stories. I can better describe the impact of living in sustained cold temperatures with no hot food. Everything we go through in life can be used in our writing, directly and indirectly. That goes for the bad we experience as well as the good. The more real something sounds – the more vivid – the more you will draw in your readers. That comforts me in a strange way – the knowledge that no matter what, I can probably use this at some point in the future.
Have you ever been through a situation like this? What happened? And do you have any good survival tips?
Hope you have a great week, full of warmth and comfort,
Kit
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