Powerless in pongville

It’s been, in a very special way, a very long weekend. After the manic rigours of the week, it was a pleasure to be home and function at one’s own pace, I thought, when I woke at my usual just-when-dawn-is-cracking time on Sunday morning. It had been a while since I had slept after 6 am, definitely in my own bed, and I got up groggy and unwilling, but unable to sleep any longer.

Pottering through the morning was normal. Sipping hot green tea, chatting idly with Father, feeding and indulging Small Cat, greeting the man with the milk, keeping an eye on the maid, sternly quelling any impulse the washing machine may have to make attempts to hop into the living room with its violent clatter…all that was part of the weekend for me, basics that the day would be incomplete without. I got through my usual day of household activity surprisingly smoothly, not even a stubbed toe to unwontedly punctuate my bustle. But I spoke to soon, methought. When I was done in the kitchen, I sat down for a few moments to read a newspaper…and that’s when it all went in the direction of disaster.

At 11:30 am sharp, the power went off. It is not something we are not used to, but it was an unexpected time. Load shedding to save electricity is a phenomenon of everyday life in townships just outside the city and we have all learned to live with it, albeit sweatily and occasionally grouchily. But the way things have been going in our area, if the power has not gone off by about 9 am, we do not expect it to go at all. I sat there trying not to move too much, Father wandered about saying how hot it was and Small Cat stretched out in a paper bag on the cool marble floor breathing heavily and flexing her claws. All part of what we already know and can live with since we have to.

But the unexpected, like trouble, tends to kick you in the behind when you can’t see it coming. Just when I had decided that a bath would do the trick, the water stopped. It was a problem in the mains, we were told, and there was no water to pump into the overhead tanks from where it would flow through our pipes (in a manner of speaking, that is). But tankers of water had been ordered and as soon as the power was restored, the pumping could begin. That was ok, understandable, not a problem. But a bath? Since there had been no warning, there was no water stored. So how could my bathroom, my hair and my self be cleansed?

I sat there and refused to get annoyed, since that would have meant a rise in my internal temperature and therefore a corresponding rise in my sweat factor (as the weathergirl of yore insisted on calling it) and thus general aura. We managed to get through lunch and some of the afternoon before I started smelling myself, a kind of gentle pong reminiscent of damp clothes and hair that had become soggy after a healthy set of aerobic exercise in a closed room with no ventilation. By the time the power was back, around 3:30 in the afternoon, I was not only wonderfully bad tempered, but feeling like I had spent some generations in a vat of particularly pongy cheese that was going rather off. I knew it couldn’t be that bad in reality, since both Small Cat and Father were still being sociable, and no one who had come to the door had keeled over with my emanations, but I felt like something that had crawled out of a swamp that held the most noxious primordial effluence.

It was a pleasure to stand directly under the high jets of a cool shower. And, as I washed all the sweat and imagined (for the most part) ordure out of my system, I thought fondly of the days when power and pong were nicely balanced in my small and happy world…