Into the light

It should never be taken for granted.

Power.

The power that illuminates our way, which lights our lives – electricity – is a modern marvel, and a still relatively recent discovery. It’s brought huge change; incredible progress. But it’s too often unloved.

I saw its impact once… and I never forget the difference power made.

As a small boy in the late 1960s and early 70s, I used to make the yearly summer pilgrimage “home”, as my dad used to call it, travelling with my parents and younger brothers from England’s industrial north to rural County Cork to visit my paternal grandmother.

When I shut my eyes now, I see the mesmerising motorway lights flash by as we head to Liverpool Docks. I can feel the port’s floodlights burn my sleepy eyes, before we clank and clatter our car up the steep ramp onto the overnight ferry to Dublin.

It feels cozy, drifting to deep childhood sleep on the waves, despite the seemingly always-rainy nighttime Irish Sea crossing.

Then a slow drive south westwards, passing green fields, through foreign towns, to another world: my grandmother’s.

Hers was de Valera’s rural dream: A natural spring for water; a nearby hamlet of happy, lilting-voiced friends; and a paraffin lamp for the darkness.

The sight of her simple, peat-warmed cottage, with no running water, no electricity – and not much of anything else, for that matter – used to put butterflies in my tummy as we arrived. My grandmother hugged me a huge hello. Then I used to run excitedly around her garden, picking pea pods, re-exploring, and, as young boys do, marveled at the outdoor privy just beyond the shed.

I couldn’t wait for it to go dark, to witness once again low light from the fire, and the hiss of the paraffin lamp. It was such an adventure!

When someone headed out to the privy, the lamp went with them. Shadows danced briefly. Card playing stopped (there was always card playing in the evenings), and faces turned to silhouette. But the chatter continued by faint fire glow as if, for all the world, it was perfectly normal.

I loved it.

But what was it like in winter, I sometimes wondered? We never visited in winter.

It was so different from the home of England where, if I stood on my tiptoes, I could flick a wall switch on and off: light, dark, light, dark, light.

Then the power came to my grandmother’s. It was sometime in the early 1970s, I don’t recall exactly when.

And with it came warmth in every room, abundant light, a fridge, and a black and white television, which bang-banged out cowboy films for summer holidays for several years afterwards.

Yes, there was a sentimental loss of the old and its inconvenient charm.

But with power came the privilege of the modern world: up-to-date news; food which could be kept safe for several days; and lighting to read and learn by.

I’ll always remember the difference it made to that little house, to my lovely long-gone grandmother, in Ireland all that time ago.

It was precious.

It was powerful.

I’ll never forget, too, the impact of electricity, the difference it makes to life, especially now, as that young-boy-turned-much-older-man embarks on a new adventure: the launch of a renewable energy company here in Britain.

And I promise never to take it for granted.

How could I, when more than a billion people on the planet still have no access to electricity?