Don't Forget the Matches

On Wednesday I noticed the water pressure in our cold tap – normally not far short of a fire hose – was dropping. We've been having new gas pipes laid on our side of the street, with lots of digging in a road surface and pavement already dug up many times, most recently to lay new water pipes; the obvious conclusion was that someone had managed to damage the water main. Although it's true that the use of a massive "suction excavator" – a real roaring beast of a machine – has radically reduced the amount of actual spade work and consequent risk of damage to buried infrastructure.

However, I thought I'd better go online to see if there was a wider problem, and there it was: "We’re really sorry that customers in parts of Southampton, Eastleigh, Romsey and the New Forest are experiencing either low pressure or a loss of water supply. This is being caused by a technical issue at our Testwood Water Supply Works". "We" being Southern Water, our local privatised monopoly, rather better at providing liquidity to its shareholders than to its customers; many thousands of whom were already without any water at all, and not for the first time. So I quickly filled every flask and bottle in the house and waited for the inevitable. By early evening the taps were dry.

Twenty-four hours later, the water started to dribble back, and by late evening had regained something of its fire-hose vigour. But then we're fortunate to live very near a major hospital, and are therefore in a priority area. Others were less lucky: it seems the last customers were restored only by mid-day on Friday. Annoying, inconvenient, and unsanitary, but hardly comparable to the consequences of a rocket strike in Ukraine or Gaza. In that phrase so characteristic of previous generations of Brits: mustn't grumble! Except we do, and should. What else can you do, faced with challenges you cannot sort out for yourself?

Another, more contemporary phrase comes to mind: First World problems. Just one day without clean running water on demand is a sobering experience for the typical UK citizen, and a disturbing taste of an alternative reality, and a possible future. I recall a line from some philosopher (Heidegger?) I read a very long time ago that went something like, "the limits of western civilisation are visible at the horizon of machines that are out of order". Well, no shit, Socrates. When that suction excavator breaks down and you have to reach for the spades, it can really spoil your day.

But there are genuine First World problems. Arthur C. Clarke is famous for his remark that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and we are surrounded by – embedded in – such wizardry: you're probably reading this on a device you couldn't begin to explain, never mind repair or adapt. But there comes a point when certain kinds of technological magic – all stacked one on top of the other – have become so routine, and so essential to everyday life in an "advanced" society, that any disruption to just one is a potential major breakdown in social order and cohesion. As I remarked to a neighbour while we were having an enjoyable little grumble about the state of the water and the gas, just wait until the Russians or Chinese decide to switch off our electricity. That will be fun, won't it?

I don't want to come across as some sort of survivalist, but we're not at all ready for the sort of disruption that quickly shades into disaster. The Covid lockdown became an ugly spectacle almost overnight: supermarket shelves stripped bare, "just in time" supply lines cut off, weeping nurses unable to buy food because selfish ████s had loaded every available ready meal and tin into their SUVs, before heading off to drain the nearest petrol station dry. We have become sleepwalkers under the spell of "late capitalist" consumerist magic, unaware in our comfortably numb condition that the hands that are, we are reassured, keeping us safe, fed, and watered are instead mostly busy constantly dipping into our pockets. We really should wake up.

So there's my little Winter Solstice Sermon... May the darkness pass, and the days begin to lengthen, as they inevitably will, in a set piece of advanced planetary technology indistinguishable from magic. But also, why not get some tins and dried goods in your cupboard, a wind-up radio, a camping stove, a good torch, and a box of candles? Oh, and don't forget the matches.

Further on down the road...