You know what I’m going to do as soon as the power comes back on after the next big power failure? That’s right, I’m going to make myself a nice cup of tea.
But immediately after that, as is my custom, I’m going to wander round the house and re-set all the digital clocks from 00:00 to whatever the time happens to be when I hear the signal.
Unless it is actually midnight, of course, in which case I’ll probably just put a pillow over the clock and go back to sleep. But wait. What if, after the next big power failure, we were to all put our clocks back exactly 10 years?
That would take us all the way back to 1998, which is when President Thabo Mbeki was warned, by means of the White Paper on Electric Energy, that if Government did not make the necessary investments in electricity infrastructure, we would have a national electricity emergency on our hands by 2008, and even worse, he would have to look down at his shoes and mutter the “S-word” in front of the whole nation.
Well, I for one am prepared to give it a try, if only because it is a much more practical and positive solution than anything Alec Erwin has so far been able to come up with.
