Warming up

The weather was foul all night. The snow turned to rain and the river flooded. Electricity went off again further up the valley. Katy and Colin are into Day 9 with no electricity and are running out of wood for their only form of heating. They came over tonight to eat with us and get warmed up, charge up appliances etc. We had the Rayburn raging out to the radiators and lit the fire.

We hadn’t got time since our return from
Suffolk to do a food shop and Colin can’t have carbs as he is trying to manage his Type 2 diabetes so I used up what I had left to concoct a kind of chilli with onion, garlic, wizened carrots, floppy celery, slimy mushrooms and an old red pepper, chillis, a tin of tomatoes, green lentils and kidney beans. I topped it with some sliced potatoes and grated cheese. It was delicious. We’d bought 0.5 alcohol Adnams for him. Katy peeled him a grape for pudding and monitored the size of the sliver of cheese he had. He knows it’s for his own good but understandably he’s a bit fed up.

The reason their electricity is off is that an obsolete transformer had gone. When Mr C worked in the industry it was nationalised and stuff like that was changed as a matter of routine. Now profits must be maximised for the billionaire owner of Northern peer grid and shareholders corners are cut at every opportunity. Whatever the current government says about exceptional circumstances is not the whole story.

Another storm - snow blizzard - is due on Tuesday