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The End of Night


Still Waters

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I sometimes try to imagine living in a city before electricity. How quiet pre-electric nights would have been without cars or trucks or taxis, without any internal combustion engines at all. No radios, televisions, or computers. No cellphones, no headphones, nor anything to plug those headphones into if you had them. How deserted the city with most of the population locked inside their homes, the night left to fears of crime, sickness, and immorality, and best avoided if one could. Finally, and most strangely—the biggest difference from that time to ours—not one single, solitary electric light.

http://www.slate.com...^editors_choice

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Until about 1956, the small village I was born in had Gas Light,inside and outside.A guy used to appear around dusk and light up the street lights, we never locked our doors until the last person was going to bed.Granny used to keep a 12 volt "wet" battery as backup incase the Gas went off if you forgot to put a sixpence in the meter, and people only had radio's...no T.V.

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The power companies in developing companies often schedule blackouts, which people can know is coming by checking the internet. They also cavalierly turn off the power for twenty minutes or so whenever it is convenient for them to do so.

This means that electricity cannot be depended on. For someone like me who does half or more of his work on the internet and who is fat and elderly and hence depends on the air con, these outages are intolerable. So of course we have an emergency generator.

The problem is that the kids in the house often run out of gas for their motorbikes, and surreptitiously (they always also deny it) steal the gas in the generator, so there is almost never any gas there and someone has to go out and find some every time the power is out -- at the same time everyone else is doing the same thing.

Oh well, it is merely one of those inconveniences we get a lot of pleasure complaining to each other about. We cook with gas and don't need refrigerators (people around here market daily), so we manage.

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If there is a place on Earth where there is no city lights in the distance to blur our skies, somehow I feel the sight would soon be spoiled by the lights of some plane traveling across the sky. The night will never be free of man made lighting now....unless something pulls the plug on us.

Edited by freetoroam
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Granny used to keep a 12 volt "wet" battery as backup incase the Gas went off if you forgot to put a sixpence in the meter, and people only had radio's...no T.V.

My gran used to have a gas meter in her house, it was under the stairs. If I remember rightly she put shillings in it. She cooked by gas but she had a coal fire for heat.

The power companies in developing companies often schedule blackouts, which people can know is coming by checking the internet. They also cavalierly turn off the power for twenty minutes or so whenever it is convenient for them to do so.

When I was younger and still living at home we used to get scheduled blackouts, but we didn't always know in advance when they were going to happen. The power would be off for hours and always in the winter when it's cold, and in the evening when it was dark anyway. Luckily for us we had a gas fire so we could at least keep warm while they lasted.

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We cook with gas and don't need refrigerators (people around here market daily), so we manage.

My gran was the same. She cooked with gas and never had a fridge or freezer. She used to keep her bread in a bread bin which she kept in her pantry under the stairs along with all her other food including milk. She lived very near to shops and went out almost daily to buy what she needed.

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I still have a gas bottle and my heating is a wood burner and an Epping stove . We do not have conventional shore lighting and smoke our own fish and meat and my husband makes his own beer.

I love it!! :yes:

ps: we do not pay council tax, and its legal. :w00t:

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The only place to get true darkness is down a pothole,its a bit uncomfortable when your hat light goes out and there,s water dripping down your neck,but you can almost feel the absolute dark like velvet against your face,then your mate shouts Ouch as he head butts a rock.

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The only place to get true darkness is down a pothole,its a bit uncomfortable when your hat light goes out and there,s water dripping down your neck,but you can almost feel the absolute dark like velvet against your face,then your mate shouts Ouch as he head butts a rock.

Its the head butting of the rocks which enables you to see the stars from down there. :whistle:

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I have things set up so that my bedroom is pitch black any times the lights are off. I have a flashlight and a lantern just in case. All the little LED things are suppressed. I find I sleep much better and have better naps when I want one.

The computer and the TV are like drinking coffee before going to bed; don't do it -- it is the darkness that makes sleep come easily.

If you want darkness to see the sky and the stars and so on, get up on a high dry desert or mountain. Even without city lights the coastal tropics never has good viewing. The best sky I ever saw was in Nevada on a dirt road way in the middle of "nowhere." (I put that in ticks because of course it was somewhere).

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The computer and the TV are like drinking coffee before going to bed; don't do it -- it is the darkness that makes sleep come easily.

How come i always fall asleep on the couch watchin telly then?

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