A touch of Third World living visited Hutton and Paxton when the villages were plunged into darkness by an unannounced power cut. 'Plunged into Darkness' is a bit of an exaggeration as it was in the early afternoon and we did not notice the lack of electricity until I went to check England's progress at Edgbaston on Teletext. I was then urged by a neighbour to report the 'fault' to Scottish Power who did not seem to be taking the situation seriously having asked his wife if she was 'sure' that it wasn't a fuse, dearie. By the time I had got through 'your call is important to us' and 'thankyou for holding you are near the top of the queue' 200 times they seemed more switched on, if that is the right expression, and I was told that a 'fault team' were rushing to the scene. We went off to walk the wife and power was back on stream by the time we returned two hours later during which time three more Australian wickets had fallen in a satisfactory fashion.
We later heard that it was unfair to blame the poor local infrastructure, lack of investment, local corruption, World Bank indifference etc-one of the Lairds harvesting machines had severed a power line in a field next to Paxton. How SP did not know from their clever computers that there was a major problem, I have no idea but perhaps they did and had not told the nice young men who man the phones on the 'Customer Help Line'. Anyhow the Laird confessed all apologetically to the Friday nighters in the pub and all is well. The poor machine driver must have got a bit of a shock-metaphorically, fortunately and was presumably saved from harm by the earthing effect of those monster tyres they all seem to favour.
