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?
--
Dave Baker