Terry Prone: Candlelit journalism on a typewriter provided different kind of power

No heat, no light, no wifi — what's a columnist supposed to do?

Trees down in Dublin City after Storm Betty brought yellow warning winds on Friday night. Picture: Sam Boal /Rollingnews.ie

When I woke up, I was wringing. As in wet, wet, wet. Now, control your nasty ageist imagination. I was wet only across the shoulders.

I reached for the light switch. Nothing happened.

Wet and in the dark, I was. I patted the bed, to discover the damp was all down one side. The window side.

It was logical to assume that Storm Betty, which could be heard doing a departing bluster outside, had something to do with this, so I got carefully out of bed, which was just as well — the careful bit, I mean — because I stepped into a puddle.

Turned out the windowsill was awash. The rain was coming in at the top, bouncing off the sill and progressing in an efficient arc to land on me in the bed.

Our columnist's workstation during Storm Betty.

It was only then I realised what had woken me. The burglar alarm, which was giving out, on the wall, about a mains fault. I pacified it with its password and assessed the situation.

Essentially, it seemed, Storm Betty had returned me to the 19th century. No heat. No light. No wifi. No water, which was puzzling. Other than the water in the wall and window leaks, which were many.

Now, this offers me the chance to let readers of the Irish Examiner in on a hidden strength of one of their columnists.

I am always prepared for power cuts. Always. Every room, every drawer has torches, candles, and matches.

If a burglar ever — God between us and all harm — got past my super modern alarm, that burglar is going to be mystified when they find torches nestling in my lingerie. (That’s knickers, to you.)

Lighting a torch, I draped myself in a model’s coat. That’s what you call a light summer dressing gown bought 10 years ago in New York. The bathroom offered just enough of a water dribble for teeth cleaning. Grand.

The lift was out of commission, so, phone in one hand, torch in the other, I climbed down the spiral staircase. (The spiral staircase is a consequence of living in a Martello tower completed in 1806.)

After clean teeth, the next step in civilised pre-dawn living is coffee. Which requires water.

Fortunately, the water filter jug had more than enough, and if I couldn’t boil it in the kettle, sure I could use the microwave, right? Wrong, my brain pointed out. Microwaves are just as dependent on electricity as are kettles. Gotcha.

Next task, therefore, after lighting a million candles and battery lanterns, to the mystification of the borrowed dog and the intense irritation of the cats, who are resistant to change and believe the bloody dog is enough of a new factor for them to be coping with, was to clear out, set and light the fire in the Ecce Ironheart stove in the main room.

The stove has a political frame of mind. It offers promise, rather than immediate gratification.

In other words, you light it and it’s 13 minutes before one of the top hob plates gets hot enough to boil an open saucepan of water for coffee, which disadvantageously then takes another 13 minutes to get really hot.

On the other hand, coffee freshly made using water boiled in this way is especially delicious, particularly when drunk in front of blazing flames and surrounded by candles and torches.

The good news that offered itself at this point was that the tower did, actually, have water. It just didn’t have HOT water, which was fine, really. Not fine was the realisation that, with no internet, I could not do the task I get up every morning at 4am to do.

I could not access the newspapers that are fundamental to that task. Nor could I get out to a shop to buy physical newspapers instead, because the gate, when there’s a power cut, decides to repel borders by locking up, trapping me inside.

Even if I could find a way around the newspaper problem, I couldn’t communicate with anybody signed up to iMessage, although old 20th-century text was fine.

“Here’s my situation,” I told the borrowed dog. (No point in telling the cats. The mission statement of cats is “Don’t give a sugar.”)

I am now faced with the inevitability of offending a couple of dozen clients and friends in one go and damn all I can do about it.”

The dog gave a snuffling supportive sigh.

“And you know what?” I went on. “It’s oddly calming, the realisation that you’re going to screw with other people’s lives without meaning to and without any way of notifying them. Oddly calming, it is.”

The dog’s gaze was filled with that profound empathic understanding they convey when they don’t know the hell what you’re on about.

I could, I thought, the first beaker of coffee re-igniting optimism, I could ring one of my staff and ask them to do the task.

This proposition died on the vine. Staff, I figured, have an unwritten right to be forgotten during sleep. Might need to be re-negotiated, but maybe not starting that early on a Saturday morning.

Then it struck me. I could write my Examiner column. This cunning plan immediately ran into the problem of the iPad not being able to save anything because of not having access to the internet.

As Tom Hanks would point out, when you use a typewriter, you end up with this marvellous thing: a faithful paper record of your keystrokes.

Modern technology doesn’t do anything as simply smart as that.

Glad not to be an airline pilot finding herself in a parallel situation, I took screenshots of each section as I wrote on the basis that I could reconstruct this column subsequently using those shots.

Editor-terror

God be with the days when typewriters ruled journalism. This is because I suffer acute editor-terror, which is odd, because, with one notable exception, my instructing editors, over 50 years, have been dotes. Dotes, I tell you.

The one notable exception, a volatile misogynistic bullying turd, is long dead and I could name him, but he may have surviving relatives he fooled about his true nature, so we’ll leave him be.

Dawn began to break through, as it always does, with its quiet luminous declaration of inchoate hope, and the phone rang. The caller was from the alarm company, which had noted my lack of protection.

I don’t tell him I was perfectly safe because the dog would terrify any intruder with the wildly enthusiastic welcome it would give them.

As the day brightened, candles were blown out, lanterns turned off, torches ditto, and restored to their hiding place.

Of course, this created the illusion that normality had returned, but it hadn’t.

I couldn’t go online to ask Eirgrid when they thought they could resume sending me electricity.

Nothing for it but another cup of coffee and reading by the brightest window. Mopping the leaks and changing the bed could wait.

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