The sweet smell of power-lessness

"Hello darkness my old friend, I've come to talk with you again"

My two hirsute golden retrievers were decorating the space with their loveliness as I was relaxing at home on a Friday night. Unexpectedly, the TV screen goes blank, and I have been plunged into darkness and an eerie silence: there is no hum from the fridge, no TV voices.

I walked to the front on my house to check if the streetlights were still on, only to find that everyone else in the street had the same idea. Like an impromptu vigil to the god of night, almost every house had someone at the front of their house with that modern stalwart of light – my iPhone torch.

Content that it was not a fault in my house and that this would be a shared experience with my neighbours, I wandered back in. To my dismay my iPhone had only 30% battery life remaining. Very soon, darkness would indeed be my old friend.

A fervent search in those cupboards which rarely see the light of day yielded two torches. Except one had rusted from over a decade of being ignored at the back of that same neglected cupboard and the other had a battery that was dead.

Desperate to bring light into my now dismal world, I reached for that undervalued commodity of the modern household, the scented candle. The same candles that I dusted for years but had rarely been used. But unlike the candlelight that our ancestors lived by before Thomas Edison actually decreed “Let there be light,” the scented candle while known for its smell is not known for its light.

Desperate, I remembered a headtorch that was buried amongst my old snow gear that I kept just in case either I went back to the snow fields, or it ever snowed in Sydney. Sadly, the latter is still the most likely. The headtorch miraculously still worked except my dogs were rather perplexed and a little concerned by their mistress parading through the house with a cone of light emanating from her forehead.

The power came back on and the hours (actually only 1 hour) of having to sit in the dark, other than my thoughts and two confused golden retrievers to keep me company, came to an end.

The next day, it was a time for a debrief with the neighbours. No-one else in the street had any backup other than that ubiquitous first world and inner western Sydney staple – the scented candle. For that precious hour of powerlessness, the street had smelt quite lovely with the scent of lavender and mint wafting through each our houses with a smattering of frangipani and peach providing perfumed filled interludes.

In this our first world predicament, we had been caught by our own inner-city complacency and complete lack of appreciation of what could go wrong. Our country-living compatriots would have rolled their collective eyes at our lack of understanding of actual inconvenience.

We have it all - power, water, food, petrol – usually all at our beck and call. Of course, uber eats will deliver you a hot chocolate at midnight. Of course, there are 24-hour petrol stations and supermarkets. Of course, Door dash can deliver that cheeky red wine that you are hankering for at 2 a.m.

And heaven forbid if the internet had gone down indefinitely. How then could we watch Emily in Paris’ outrageous fashion choices or the struggles of the Housewives of Los Angeles on our smart TV!

While our scented candle back-up in a power blackout did provide us with a lovely Zen-infused space to just contemplate our existence, I think perhaps a trip to the hardware store might be in order as well as a reality check for of what actual inconvenience looks like. So, in my new appreciation of how useless scented candles actually are in a power blackout and how first world my life actually is, I have a thought.

Instead of giving someone a scented candle as a present for Christmas, a donation to those who have actual problems might be order. The sweet smell of kindness is simply much more intoxicating.