Earlier this year, Storm Eunice left my family and me without power for four days. It was a pointedly and surprisingly discombobulating experience: a shock reminder of how much of modern life depends on electricity. No heat, no light, no hot water, no internet, no screens. Our village was the only one out in the area, and driving back home after sunset felt like travelling through that famous satellite photograph of North Korea: lights blazing all around, but in our small corner of the world nothing bar total darkness.
First World problems, of course. But that’s the point. We have become so used to perpetual utility supply that we have forgotten an essential truth: it is a privilege, not a right. We flick a switch and the lights come on; we turn a tap and water comes out; we twist a dial and gas springs from the hob. The certainty of these things is a luxury enjoyed by, proportionally, only a tiny handful of people throughout history.
There are still plenty in this country who can remember what it was like without. The pictures here come from exactly 75 years ago: early 1947, a bitterly cold winter during which snow fell somewhere in the country on 55 consecutive days. It was also, of course, less than two years after the end of World War II, with an exhausted population still subject to severe rationing of both food and energy.
But what’s striking about all three pictures taken in London – the queue for coke in Nine Elms, the candles being lit at 9am at the Cumberland Hotel, and the factory girls pedalling to keep the tent and tarpaulin machines working in Mile End – is how normal everyone seems to find it. Some people are smiling despite the privations: everyone seems to be accepting of them.
It may yet be that this winter we find out for ourselves some measure of what that feels like. For many it will at times be a choice between heating and eating: for many more, rolling power cuts could become a feature of life. You may well ask how this has come to pass here and now, in the sixth largest economy in the world during a time of unprecedented technological progress. The answers are neither simple nor altogether edifying: but to look only outwards is to deny our own role in all this.
In this respect, it was – pardon the pun – illuminating to see public reaction to the Just Stop Oil protesters who closed Dartford Bridge last month. Most were outraged at the disruption: some said they supported the cause but the protestors should “go through the proper channels”. Few seemed to appreciate that the disruption was essential to the protest. Environmental activists have spent decades “going through the proper channels,” and it has got them if not exactly nowhere then certainly much less far than they hoped. Any serious student of political movements knows that direct action is often an essential part of successful campaigns: not in and of itself, but certainly as one prong of a multi-layered approach, to jolt the populace out of complacency and force us to address issues we have hitherto chosen to ignore.
“Wanting people to listen, you can’t just tap them on the shoulder anymore,” says the antagonist John Doe in Se7en. “You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you’ll notice you’ve got their strict attention.” Perhaps this winter, no matter how harsh and uncomfortable it is, will prove to be that sledgehammer, forcing us to recalibrate not just our consumption but our attitudes too.
Boris Starling is an award-winning author, screenwriter and journalist. His latest novel, “The Law Of The Heart”, is out now
