TWO THINGS are guaranteed about February – it’s cold and it’s dark, and never more so than in that winter of 1972.
It was the month when the lights went out. And the heating went off.
And when the TV shut down, and the cooker wouldn’t work, and the fridge/freezer ceased humming and thawed out; when your fancy hi-fi system fell silent, and the house had to go un-Hoovered, and even if you were really posh you had to do your own washing up because that marvel of the modern kitchen, the dishwasher, was kaput; in short, when anything that was electric suddenly stopped.
All of us who lived through the power cuts of ‘72 remember them well, the times of darkness and silence and that eerie feeling of having been plunged backwards into a kind of medieval living.
Shared hardships. The Blitz Spirit. For the first time, the post-war generation who had grown up in the Fifties and wallowed in the excesses of the Sixties were about to understand what it meant to find the everyday conveniences of life, as they had always known it in peacetime, to begin falling apart.
In a way, it was a return to a war of sorts, at least that’s what the politicians on one side and the
