There I was, working on my PC when, with no warning, the computer switched off. At first, I thought it had crashed (which would be the first time ever) but it turned out we were experiencing our first power cut for a good couple of years.
In the past, this has always been a local fault but, a few moments later, the 4G signal disappeared along with all other forms of mobile connectivity and I was, just like that, back in the 1990s.
I spend my days writing post apocalyptic science fiction and it didn't take long for me to become a little paranoid. I went out to the back garden and listened to the silence. No cars moving on the road outside. And my mind leapt to the ongoing war in the east. Was this an EMP attack? That would explain the power cut, the loss of mobile internet and, perhaps, the lack of vehicles.
We don't have any radios in the house of any sort, digital or analogue, and there was no way to contact my wife at work and my son at school. I sat in the silence and tried to stop my imagination getting away with me. It occurred to me that if something catastrophic had happened, then I'd probably know no more than I did at that point.
And then, bit by bit, the mobile connectivity returned so I could get to Twitter to find out what was going on. Turned out to have been a fault in the National Grid's "Extra-high voltage network" that affected around 3,000 post codes (probably around 150,000 people). The good thing about that is the electricity company has to prioritise faults of that level of seriousness, so they had it working again an hour and a half later.
Oh, the relief of stepping back into 2022! But it has made me think about our preparedness for outages of this sort - what if it had gone on for 24 hours? Power cuts happen so rarely that it's easy to forget that they do happen. I couldn't have done anything about the lack of mobile signal, but I do need to have a radio in the house so I can listen to the national news and reassure myself that I don't need to go to panic stations, but rather just wait it out. Stand down from red alert.