Wednesday started bright and fresh at our peak district cottages.  One  cottage out.  Plan for today was to go to Bookers in Chesterfield as I needed to replenish stocks.  I also needed to do some food shopping.  I had hoped to set off in the morning but it wasn’t until after lunch that I finally set off.  After Bookers I went to Dunelm but didn’t have time for Morrisons as I had a WI committee meeting in the evening and wanted to get back to get things ready.  I was just unloading the car and chatting to some of the guests when the power went off.  We have the odd blip with power but after a few minutes I phoned the electricity suppliers but they said they had no records of an outage but took my details.   When the power goes off and things start beeping it spooks the dogs.  Blue went upstairs and Smudge tried to jump in the car but couldn’t as I hadn’t finished unloading so he went and sat in the car park for a while!  A few minutes later Joanna phoned as they had no power and had not long started milking and then our neighbours at Haddon Grove Cottages also phoned.  I then got a call from the electricity suppliers who said the situation had rapidly escalated and they were now aware of nearly 200 properties without power.   The very helpful chap said he would phone me back and update me.  Chris was at Buxton as he had gone on an evening training session so I had to get all the emergency kits ready.  I went round all the cottages and updated them and luckily, just after 7pm, two hours after losing power it came back on. At least it meant I didn’t have to hand out the Tilly lamps!  Had a quick bite to eat and fed the dogs before Joanna and Lynne arrived for the WI meeting.  They were still without power at the farm so had used a generator to get milking done.  We were just about to conclude our meeting when the power went off again, but this time only for a few minutes. Unfortunately I didn’t have a torch handy but knew where one was so I had to feel my way around the walls to get to it!  When Chris came back he had to adjust a number of manual timers which he will have to do again in a few weeks time when the clocks change.   Was glad when the day was over and could fall into bed!

(We were lucky as the farm did not get it’s power back until the next morning and we lost power again temporarily during the night.  This was due to the engineers manually reconnecting other properties but sometimes they have to disconnect some to reconnect others so they told me.  They did phone on Thursday morning to check everything was OK and apparently the problem was called by an isolator going bang big time – it even took the top of the pole off!)