When my parents bought their first semi-detached house together it was built on a green-field site in Rumney. When we as a family went to visit, it was basically a field with Michaelmas daisies, a few poppies and lots of grass. Eventually a rough road was cut into the site, and the outline of the proposed streets began to take shape.
Foundations were laid and building work began. But not on our plot!
We were given various reasons for this delay, the most convincing one being that our plot was a sort of roundabout and roadway for the trucks and lorries serving the site and therefore could not be built on until much of the basic work on the site had been done.
I had moved schools from Cathays to Llanrumney to accommodate our move into the new house. Which wasn’t there and continued not to be there as I started Standard Three in Glan yr Avon Primary School.
The great advantage of buying a new build is that you have some say (as far as the money stretches) to add extras, and so we were able to have double the allocation of power points in the kitchen and the living room. And, as I recall a fancy tiled fireplace. We could not stretch to a garage. I love the way I say “we” as if my seven-year-old self could have contributed anything in the way of actual money to the enterprise!
By the time that we were fully established in the new house it was the early 1960s and it was rapidly becoming clear that even with double the electrical outlets the power needs were outstripping the sockets available. This was even more clearly the case in the kitchen where, in our previous home, the only regularly used electrical item (apart from the washing machine with mangle) was the toaster – whereas in the consumer driven 60s more and more electrical aids were deemed essential to the modern home.
Nowadays so many of the devices, desires and gadgets of ordinary existence have batteries and need feeding on a daily basis that there are never enough outlets in which to plug to keep life going.
I was going to continue by listing how many things I could see from where I am sitting that need power, but having seen two radios, three fans, a computer, a printer, three lights – I am disinclined to continue before people wonder what else is lurking in the morass of ‘stuff’ on my desk, and how the hell I manage to get anything done in said chaos (cf. earlier blogs!)
This means, of course, in rooms that are studies, you will always find the ubiquitous trailing socket sprouting an unhealthy (and dangerous) accretion of plugs which, if all were utilized at the same time would probably short out most of the neighbourhood.
I have to admit that I am guilty of trying to get around the dearth of sockets via the powered raft approach to electrical supply – but the offending articles are usually out of sight, under desks or behind furniture and therefore out of mind.
Considering that I am surrounded by highly flammable paper in the form of books, magazines and my writing, I like to think that my word production is at least on a par with the danger inherent in moderate mountaineering. I laugh to scorn electrical adversity! Right up until the first spark. And I don’t mean of imagination.
The only thing that is running ‘hot’ on my desk is my Mac Mini which, with its base giving me more outlets looks as though it is powering a small city. As a concession to safety I have taken out one of the power drains on it, where it was powering up a mini power bank!
How many years do I have to regress before I can remember a time where I did not need extra electricity, where the power kept the light on and I needed nothing more?
I can still remember the birthday when I was about six, when I woke up to find my present had been placed in my bedroom when I was asleep, a wind-up record player with a very small collection of 78 rpm shellac records for me to play. My parents were woken from their slumbers by the first of (many) playings of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (a tune and song they came to hate, as I never wearied of playing it) until the needle wore down and had to be replaced.
I had no radio, or phone, or computer, or television, or ipad, or camera or anything that was electrical. The most sophisticated thing that I owned was a Raleigh Star Rider bicycle that I was given for passing the 11+
“The Good Old Days”? I think not, it’s a meaningless question, there are far too many variables to consider for it to be useful. But different certainly. And something to think about.
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