I was playing in the spare room upstairs with Alexander having put it back the way it usually is after Michael & Gillian had left. The lights went out and Alexander popped up from under the duvet to tell me off! He was pretty good in the dark (and it was dark because of the cloud and the fact that all the lights in the vicinity had gone off).

We carefully made our way downstairs to find a torch and some candles and set to getting some light. A few trips were made to the garage to try and find the proper gas lamp, but it eluded us and the one torch we could find wasn’t really up to the job (it being a toy wind-up torch). I did, however, find a bag of very large candles and Tracy had found a bag of tea lights in the house. About ten minutes after the power went off we were sitting in the living room with enough light for Tracy to read some stories for Alexander.

An hour in there was still no sign of light, apart from the odd candle, from the nearby houses, although our friends a couple of hundred yards away had their power back on (after about five minutes it turned out). We thought about going to see them, but decided to go out and buy dinner, especially as it was starting to get cold (gas central heating requires electricity for the controls, so it stopped too).