The power of the fetish?

I was feeling quite smug to have left Togo when I did, when I was told this afternoon that the office generator there packed up last weekend and that they have had no electricity all week. But then I got home to find I have no electricity either. Apparently it went off this morning and no-one knows when it will come back on. I’m sitting here drafting this using my laptop’s battery, with a candle beside me.

We have reached ‘power cut season’, apparently. I’m wondering now how well-sealed my freezer is. If I wake up tomorrow to find the electricity back on, how will I know whether my fresh prawns, fish fillets and ice cream stayed frozen, or thawed out and then re-froze? & just how dangerous are re-frozen prawns?


Well, to continue the story, the electricity is back on. I checked on the ice-cream, to find a thick frozen layer had appeared under the ice-cream at the bottom of the tub, which on investigation seems to be most of the flavour from out of the ice-cream. Oh well, every cloud has a silver lining: if it’s no longer good enough to serve to visitors I shall just have to eat it all up myself – and it will go quite well with the huge mound of mangoes I have from my trees!

Some bookshelves have arrived at the house, so I spent a few happy hours unpacking three boxes full of books – just in time, it turned out, for the front room to be looking at its best so far for a visit from the owner of the house, with an architect in tow. They had come to inspect the widening crack that I asked, two months ago, to be dealt with.

After a lot of scraping and prodding, we found out that the front part of the house is not properly built, the crack (and other smaller ones) being caused by the walls splitting apart under the weight of the roof. As this will eventually cause the front of the house to collapse, the owner agreed that it would have to be fixed – a week’s solid building work (I guess that means two weeks…) with attendant dust and disruption. Apparently I will have to pack up and move everything from the front room while they do the work. Just as well I still have the book boxes, I suppose. The architect said he suspected there were no foundations either, but as the house is only single storey that’s apparently not an enormous problem.

But it left me wondering – does the identification and rectification of this fault with the house mean that my fetish is doing its stuff??