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Near where I live National Grid are replacing the overhead cables. The new cables will have increased capacity and allow for more connections to green energy.
For the June comp please include electricity in a story of no more than 500 words.
I’m looking for the stuff that travels through lines and sockets but if you also want to include electricity as a metaphor, feel free.
Deadline is midnight on 30th June.
Hunting The Children of Electric
You may think we’ve harnessed electricity but don’t be fooled by its compliance, it’s merely an angry beast straining at its leash, longing to be free.
If you’ve stood watching for the crackle-flash of its untamed brother, then counted and listened for the rumble, you’ll know what I mean when I say, the effect of that wild, white-blue, flicker of unmatched brightness is terrifyingly exciting.
Muted by clouds rolling across the air, it might expand into arc-light and tint the earth below, or casually hurl jagged blades, bright as electric spears, down from the shadowy sky. In either form, such lightning hints of voltage, caught up in brilliant crystalline shards of molten heat, driven by fierce winds of ether.
How can you not be fascinated by such power?
Yet, those hoping to capture its vitality should know this is still a tamer breed. Sheet or forked it’s both the same, just happening on mismatched sides of clouds.
Me, I hunt the rainbowed spheres of netted power generated by massive thunderstorms.
Some call them ball lightning, foo fighters, or St Elmo’s fire, but they are, in reality, those, elusive, children of electric that float in fickle, fuzzy, gemstones of rotating energy.
They follow no path, break all the rules and are tantalizing in their omnipotence.
The small, pea-sized, ones that sometimes tumble down a chimney or slip through a window and mesmerise you, are easy to bottle. I have shelves filled with over a hundred, incandescent, flasks of them.
The fist-sized variations of dappled orange need more careful handling and of course are better stored in barrels.
Although both varieties have been known to pop inside their containers, like over stimulated champagne, they are generally safe to handle, but the rarer, larger, ones, those as big as your head, well they’re trickier to deal with. I know because I’ve been teased, taunted, scorched and beaten backward by their touch, several times, when I’ve encountered them.
Their danger crackles hungrily, tingling the senses, luring you with beauty and calling to you with seductively singed tones. They seek to prickle your skin with hot fingers and can lift your hair with static or just as easily blacken your flesh and send you into oblivion.
Such treasures are gloriously flashing balls of fettered fire, shining with yellow filaments, or sparking red teardrops of flame. They are able to float and hang as potent orbs, or dart and hover like fat dragonflies, trailing a sulphurous tang of electrical power. Explosive, and naturally resonant, with unbridled crack-snap heat, they can burn wood, bend metal, dance through pylons and devour the power lines of their more subdued sibling.
I have learned, for these priceless beauties, you must counteract their primal force with a mossy earth-lined cage of filigreed and charm cast stone.
You also need nerves of ice, a steady hand and, please excuse the pun, lightning reflexes.481
Electricity and us
Electricity has played a considerable part in directing the path our lives have travelled, from the instant (if only sensory) flash of knowledge, at the end of our first date, that “This man is who I can safely be ME with!” to our fifty years of living in the North East.
At that time (5th April 1963) Steve worked for a company manufacturing Purple Hearts. Soon after swapped drugs for precious metals before joining (as had his father) the CEGB. West Ham power station was a longish commute from a Hertfordshire village on a dodgy motorbike, extended twice a week via Northern Poly to do a day release BSc in chemistry and zoology.)
June 1964 I’d left school (with 2 ‘O’ levels), then failed an OND in Business studies, but did learn typing and shorthand.
We got engaged. (More emotional electricity: my father warning, when Steve requested permission, “You’re worth ten of her!”; his father, “Oh gorblimey, what d’you wanna do a thing like that for?” as his mother cried, “But you’re so young!” Yet more sparks when we married: Not In Church.
Steve passed his Finals and transferred to the Electricity Board’s Central Radiochemical laboratory. (More money but not enough to afford a house in Hornsey so we started married life in a mobile home in Waltham Abbey (an electricity pylon only yards away), before buying a house in Enfield. By 1971 the laboratory job had palled enough to begin to look for another electricity job.
We’d two children by the time the health physics job at Hartlepool’s as yet uncommissioned nuclear power station was offered, requiring the measuring and implementation up of radiation protection procedures for workers and public on a nuclear power station site (and giving him the power to evacuate Hartlepool should it become necessary!)
Despite warnings such as “They eat their children there!” we were eager to move, and with access to the East coast and then Scotland’s wonderful countryside, friendly folk and so uncrowded, soon realised it was the best thing we ever did.
In 1993 privatisation, led to voluntary redundancy which we’ve been enjoying ever since.
[358 words]
Energy and shame
Understanding is a difficult word sometimes. We say, ‘I understand her,’ meaning that we know her reasons for doing something or other. It was as expected. Electricity feels rather different. Do I understand it? I mean, what is it? I was taught a load of rubbish at school about the movement of charged electrons. That isn’t electricity. Many people think of it as being a bit like water. It’s pumped into our houses along cables. It isn’t that either. So where is the stuff of electricity, if you can call it that? Here’s a clue: it isn’t inside the cables, held prisoner by a rubber casing. Not at all. Turns out that the stuff of electricity is in the space around the cables. The charge, the energy that makes your lights glow bright, or Wikipedia pop up on your screen, is right there in the room with you. The cables aren’t carrying the electricity; they’re guiding it: establishing a path. The early scientists were wise when they came up with the word “conductor”. The insulation isn’t to prevent you from touching the electricity, it’s to protect you from being a guide: a conductor.
Kath was like that. Well, no, she wasn’t like that exactly, but she steered energy and made things happen. I wanted to be part of that, but there was always something, some insulation keeping me from being a part of her process.
Well, actually that’s not quite right either. I was scared of the stuff that was out there in the world with me. I was frightened of her energy and what she did. Deep down I felt that if I ever conducted some of that, I might be destroyed.
And, I have to admit that I haven’t explained the whole thing. Not honestly. I didn’t really want to be part of her process. I didn’t want to conduct her energy. I wanted her to be weaker, safer, less risky. I didn’t want a power station. I wanted a triple-A battery; but I wanted the world to believe I was connected to a power station. That I could contain it.
Of course, she got stronger, not weaker. I backed away from something, someone, so dangerous. Perhaps not far enough. When an electrical charge reaches a certain magnitude, we are all at risk of becoming conductors. And she was a force like that. So, I began to have some success, though it was a pale imitation of hers. The world is unfair and often rewards those who do not deserve it. I was flattered by the rewards.
Before long, there were those who spoke of me as the power station, and Kath as one of my many followers.
Shame is not like electricity. I will not achieve much, powered by shame. My shame is not out there in the world, it is here inside the insulation on my over-praised carcase. I know that sooner, rather than later I have to switch off and let the real energy thrive.
5oo words
These three pieces are all so interesting and satisfying, and such good uses of ‘electricity’ that, as usual, I’ve struggled to decide on a winner because the standard is so high. I’m intrigued by how something as impersonal and powerful as electricity has resulted in intimate pieces, not just in the content but in the sense of including the reader – sometimes through direct address. A huge force translated into human experience and connection.
Terrie, @purplewitch I enjoyed the personal voice of the narrator and the carefully managed move from realism to magical realism, or perhaps steampunk. I don’t know if I’m landing in the right categories here but I liked the control within this piece, the evocative lapidary descriptions and the development of electricity as a character.
Sandra, @sandradavies I liked the personal narration here. I don’t know how autobiographical this piece may be but it has a sense of lives being lived that I much enjoyed. The details felt real and interesting. And what a good interweaving of electricity in its various forms, literal and metaphorical.
Ath, @athelstone another enticing first-person narrator, essayistic opening and a smooth move into story territory. There’s a very interesting sense from this narrator of a life that’s been experienced rather than fully initiated by them, of a love affair that benefitted them unfairly, and a realisation about what they have to do. A very enjoyable read.
Terrie, congratulations, and over to you!
Wow. Thank you Libby for this at-first-sight innocuous challenge. (I tried to resist the autobiographical, but in the end it was the only way for me to go) so thank you Terrie and Ath for such impactful alternatives; I’m glad I didn’t have the task of choosing between them.
Thank you for the challenge, Libby. And very well done to Terrie for another powerful piece of story telling.
This was such a good challenge producing three different perspectives .
I agree with Sandra picking a winner is always difficult at the best of times and I think we all did brilliantly. So well done Ath and Sandra and thanks for passing the baton over to me, Libby.
I will be posting next months challenge shortly .
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