The power outage

No phone. No internet. No power.

Monday’s power outage across Spain came out of nowhere.

Curious about what was going on (and just a little perturbed), I knocked on my neighbour’s door. She’d heard whispers — a massive outage affecting Spain, Portugal, and beyond.

With no battery left on my laptop, I turned to decluttering my study. And in the quiet, I uncovered long-lost treasures:

💌 Thank you notes from Japanese students
🎉  Scribbled ideas for hilarious energisers
🗼 A copy of a Welsh women’s magazine with an article on Paris I’d written ages ago.

At the end of the afternoon, I took Phoebe for a walk to the local park and ended up chatting with a group of dog walkers. No phones meant more stories, more eye contact, more being there.

We swapped what scraps of news we had — from radios, supermarket queues, and word of mouth.

No one rushed off. There was nowhere to rush to. I was grateful for their company.


We often talk about connection as something digital — but there’s another kind.

The kind that lives in a neighbourly exchange.

A conversation in the park.

A shared moment of not-knowing.

The power was out. But connection wasn’t.

And that, perhaps, is what I remember most about the day we unintentionally unplugged.


Has a moment of stillness ever led you somewhere unexpected?

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash