Where was Moses when the lights went out?

 I was woken up by the sound of someone smashing the pavement outside our house. Two men in hi-viz all-weather overalls were beating the shit out of it. You don't question the high visibility community. They are a force majeure, an act of God. They are a part of the natural world, the sort of localised catastrophe that right-wing Christians pray befall people who think differently to them. I miss the candy-striped tents of yore, and these blokes look like they missed them as well as it was tipping it down. The saddest thing you'll ever see is the workman who lost the bet, eating his lunch in the drizzle as there's only room for one in the digger. And its not the sort of drizzle Jamie Oliver would endorse for money. 

Its the electric that's the problem,  so I'm writing this against the clock as I've been promised the electric will stop at some point. The man couldn't tell me when though. A master of suspense, he was Hitchcock in a hard hat. I have a Zoom call at four*, so I'm guessing it will be then. Or perhaps halfway through cooking dinner on our electric stove.  

I went to the shops and gave the workmen the slow nod in the rain. When I returned I was unable to get back in the house. They had cordened off the front of it and the pavement had been smashed to biscuits and excavated, and a moat had been dug, oozing slick, oligeanous mud. The digger had been parked in front of the driveway, so I stood in the road in the rain with my shopping and tried to get them to let me into my house without wading through the Somme. 

After several minutes they reversed the digger, the man undid the little plastic picket fence and ushered me in. He started talking to me and I felt obliged to say nice things to him, he had been working hard after all. In only one day he had completely destroyed that pavement. He told me, I'm paraphrasing here, the electricity should be going through three "wires" but it was now only going through one and that was "in the red", so it was imperetive the work was started and finished as quickly as possible*. I agreed, but perhaps not effusively enough, as he started telling me again. I told him that I'd been stuck in the house for a year, barricaded in and unable to escape, and this felt like the physical manifestation of that. Once I went in the house the digger would caterpillar back into place and the fence would be closed and I really would be unable to leave the house. Sealed in like an anchorite. 

He gave me a bit of a funny look and I thanked him for something and I went in the house and hid. I have forgotten how to speak to people who aren't Susan. 

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop now. We've been promised a power-cut - and I believe they can deliver - but when and for how long? I was going to end this mid-sentence, like The Sopranos, but...meh...

*They actually went home at four. So its not that imperetive. I don't blame them - that was a bloody miserable day. I hope they have soup.