Living out in county Mayo as we do, we recently had the mispleasure of experiencing a particular storm which left us without electricity from the early hours of 24th January to mid afternoon on the 2nd February, over ten days.

The storm damage to us personally was fairly light. A couple of dislodged tiles, parts of our old famine era stone wall on the western boundary, two galvanised steel gates were seriously bent, a block built fence post shattered, and a number of branches felled. My two bee colonies were destroyed, once neatly ordered combs littering the landscape half way to Donegal and two outbuilding doors damaged. The shed doors and the gates have had running repairs. The felled branches will provide firewood for next year.

However, the electronic fallout was worse.

The resulting ten day long power outage wrecked one of my laptops, a Linux machine, leaving me with my remaining, and increasingly finicky Windows 10 laptop, which drops network connections at the drop of the proverbial hat. The Linux client can be rebuilt, and all data was successfully backed up. Just not for some time. I like Linux as an operating system, but on my current hardware it is unstable and more trouble that it is worth.

However, one of my digital alter egos will never recover. The decision by WordPress to insist on dual logon verification and a similar decision by Google and all the other online platforms means that he is effectively and digitally dead. The blogs in question will remain until the platform we subsist upon disappears, but they will never be updated again. Not unless WordPress and Google release the accounts.

Then there was the rapidly thawing mess left in our freezers, the monetary value of which was approximately 3-400 Euros worth of frozen food. This was hygienically buried in a specially dug pit just beyond the back garden wall. A task which took up time and energy between boiling water for washing and beverage production, temporary fixes to gates and shed doors, as well as keeping our one source of reliable heat, a log burning stove in one front room. Then there was the lack of water when our local water pumping station was without power, it’s backup generator moved to the south to ensure that Kerry did not lose water when the well-predicted storm hit. The brunt of the storm itself hit further north.

In advance of the predicted bad weather I had laid in a supply of drinking water and about forty litres of other water for flushing toilets. For the three days we were without any mains water, that was all that stood between us and some very unpleasant outcomes.

For ten days we struggled along, burning up almost a third of our winter log supply simply keeping warm with none of the conveniences of modern life. Effectively living like our parents and grandparents did in the 1920’s and 30’s without all of their social support mechanisms. Almost a hundred years back in a single night.

Had it not been for the timely purchase of two high storage energy banks to keep our mobile phones charged and a friendly service station with its own generator, then the sense of being dropped through a time warp to the early 20th century would have been complete.

On the tenth day we decamped in abject frustration to county Wexford, en route for France, on a holiday we had booked and paid for last August. On the ferry to Cherbourg, one of the last notifications we received from ESB, Ireland’s electricity generation board, was that our power had been restored. The twenty first century had returned! The heating and security systems booted nicely, so we can now not only control the heat within our home, but actually see who comes a-visiting while we are on holiday in France.

Which is where we are now. Currently in the historic centre of Tours, home to many of the rulers of ancient France, enjoying the sights, even if frustrated by the one way system.

We’re simply enjoying the slightly warmer weather and richness of French food, being reminded that the French are the very monarchs of baking. Which makes the next few weeks something to look forward to.

Given the last ten days, Angie and myself desperately need this timeout for recovery. The relationship between us was recently put under extreme pressure and unbalanced us both. Before we begin moving forward again, we both need to recover our centre, our inner equilibrium. That is what this break is to be about.

As far as writing is concerned I’ve been looking at the manuscript for ‘Darkness between the stars’. Frankly it’s a mess. In the 80,000 words so far, too much has been cut and pasted disrupting the story flows to the point where a complete re-write of the whole trilogy is in order. On the other hand perhaps I might do better disassembling it and beginning the project I first envisioned in 2009 called ‘Earth’s night’, a series of future history style manuscripts where the events of my ‘Stars’ trilogy underpins most of the events, assisting with some of the foreshadowing.

So long as no more storms or major power outages hit, or we decide to move continents yet again, I might actually finish something worthwhile.