THE IMPORTANCE OF ELECTRICITY

It is my daughter's (she of the There And Back Again blog) nineteenth birthday today, so congratulations to her.

She is currently living in some village in Rajasthan, so we arranged that she would Skype with us this afternoon for a chat. Unfortunately, when it came to the moment, there was a power cut - a fairly common occurrence in India - and she couldn't get through. The power came back on half an hour later, and there was some sort of communication, but it didn't really work. We had to ring her on her mobile phone, presumably at great expense.

When we lived in Tanzania, there were power cuts all the time, so I got used to it. After 13 years back in Europe, you get used to the opposite, namely that the power is on all the time. Today's incident reminded me how much we all depend on it.

Walter Blotscher