Dave Baker wrote:
In the 25 years I lived in my last house in southern suburbia I can
count the number of times the lecky went out on the fingers of one
heavily mutilated hand. Since moving to the middle of feckin nowhere
in Aberdeenshire it's been about a dozen times in 18 months.

We started off with a spate of them in 2012, then it settled down for
a while, we had another one last back end and then it went out for an
hour and a half yesterday again. Several have been in the middle of
the night where I only realise it happened because the clock on the
cooker is flashing and has lost its settings when I get up.

I'd assumed it was just some specific fault on a wire local to our
little enclave here which some bugger really ought to get round to
fixing properly but finally I phoned up the power company yesterday
when the phone started working again and it had knocked out the power
to 352 houses over a several mile area and was reported in as "an
explosion at the top of a power pole in someone's garden".

He also looked up the previous outage and that was over a wide area
too. So no general problem with our local supply, just sod's law it
seems. Branches falling onto cables etc.

So I'm happy it isn't just my house or its supply but surprised it
happens so often. Is this just a "living in the sticks" sort of thing
we have to get used to?

I've lived on the same estate for my 49 years, different houses though.
Last power cut was in 1974 when Ted Heath took on the miners, more or less
forty years ago this month.
Underground mains here....I've not heard of a power cut happening anywhere
else in my town for a very long time.