Electrified by mystery and mystified by electricity

A sense of the mystery the world is a fine thing, isn’t it?

It’s most common in children. That’s why they’re always asking how things happen and, even more disconcertingly, why. Questions it isn’t always easy to answer. 

To be honest, I find plenty of things highly mysterious myself. I’m not sure whether that’s because, at my advanced age, I’m entering a second childhood, or simply because I’ve done nothing about my monumental ignorance in many areas. Either way, it leaves me wondering what’s going on whenever something I find inexplicable happens in my life.

One of these is power cuts.

We seem to be getting rather more of these than I would normally expect. Certainly a lot more than we used to get in England. I don’t know whether that’s to do with being in Spain, though I have to say that my sons who live in Madrid or nearby don’t seem to have the same problems. It may just be to do with the particular neighbourhood where we live. That’s La Cañada, in the suburbs of Valencia, and it includes some pretty spectacular houses (not ours, I hasten to add). 

The presence around here of some wealthy characters gives the place an unusual character. For instance, we have our own private water company. It’s a cooperative, but still very clearly private and separate from the utility that supplies the city of Valencia. I’m not sure whether that’s supposed to be a sign of privilege or what. To be honest, it seems to me that the only striking feature this arrangement has, is that it leads to frequent cuts to our water supply on the flimsy pretext that, yet again, they have further maintenance or repair work to carry out. On the other hand, and to be fair, they generally reconnect the supply reasonably quickly, leaving me as bemused as ever as to why they had to cut it in the first place.

I’m not sure whether the same kind of arrangement has been made for our electricity supply. I just know that it’s about as reliable as the water. Just the other day, we had three power cuts, none of them long (the first for about three-quarters of an hour, the second and third just for a few minutes), but all of them irritating.

The only good thing about that kind of experience is that it serves as a useful lesson in just how dependent we now are on technology. God forbid that it ever suffers a genuinely catastrophic collapse.

When the power fails, my first reaction is to check our own fusebox. There was a time when we could be pretty sure that our main circuit breaker would have broken the circuit (which does at least suggest that it’s fully understood its function in life). The reason would generally be that we had too many devices taking too much electricity for our rather old wiring, dating from a time when people’s requirements for power were more modest than ours today.

That hasn’t happened for a while, suggesting that we’ve established a better balance between the number of devices we run at any one time and the capacity of the wiring to manage them. But when it was the circuit breaker, it was only a matter of pushing a switch back up, once we’d ensured that we didn’t have too many power-hungry systems running.

This is the start of mystery I was talking about earlier. 

When I discover that the cut isn’t down to anything in the house, but something to do with the electricity company, the image that comes to my mind is of a switch, like mine, which needs to be pushed back up. Only I see it as much larger than my switch, once of those old-fashioned lever types, which has to be lifted with great care and not a little muscular strength by people with a special understanding of the delicacy of the task.

How I see our power controlled

Then my knowledge of Valencian customs adds a new dimension to the picture. You see, in my experience, workers in Valencia all seem to share a certain series of habits concerning mealtimes. They have breakfast before they arrive on site, then work until about 11:00, and then head off for what they call ‘almuerzo’. This is generally translated as ‘lunch’ but in Valencia, and even if we’re not in the city of that name, we’re in the province, it’s more like what in England we’d call elevenses (and you’ll have noticed, appropriately timed). They then come back for a couple of hours before heading off again for lunch and maybe even a siesta, before starting work again and going on into the evening.

Now I see the main switch in the power station being the responsibility of two large men, similar to the point that one might almost take them for twins. Now, if the power failure occurs while they’re off for their almuerzo, or worse still if they’re away having lunch and a siesta, why, it could be an hour or more before they get back and grunt and sweat against the resistance that high tension produces (or at least so I imagine) to get the power reconnected.

That would explain why it sometimes takes so long for the power to come back on. Though not why it goes off so often.

It’s perfectly possible that things are nothing like that, of course. Control in the power station may be far more sophisticated with simple little buttons to press. But I find that far less satisfactory as an image of what’s happening. And my image feels much more appealing.

Especially as it leaves so much of the mystery as intact and unexplained as ever. Which, surely, is all the fun of a mystery.