In the comments after my last scribble, Pete J mentioned the Carrington Event.

For those who couldn’t be arsed to look it up, the Event was a solar storm back in 1859 which had major implications for power lines and the telegraph.

So naturally my thoughts turned to pondering what would happen if Carrington was repeated these days. There is nothing to suggest that it couldn’t repeat any time, and there is nothing we could do about it. It may not be probable but it is certainly possible.

Things have changed a bit since 1859. Back then they hadn’t copped on to the idea of silicone chips or satellites, both of which are vital to the modern world. Satellites would presumably be all fried, so the immediate effect would be to navigation. No ship would dare set sail or plane take to the skies without electronic navigation or communication. It’s more than likely that power supplies would be crippled and would take weeks or months to repair. The Interweb would take months, if not rears to recover. How long would it take them to build and relaunch all those satellites?

So how about life at the Manor? To put it mildly, I’d be fucked. With no power I would have no cooking or heating. I would be back to my camping stove for cooking and oil lamps for light. That would be fine until my gas and paraffin run out, and then I would have to resort to sticking a kettle into a burning fire in the grate to boil water. I think we have a few candles hanging around. Actually paraffin wouldn’t be a problem for a couple of years as I have a few hundred litres of heating oil [same thing]. That assumes of course that my water supply isn’t affected.

For communication I would have to revert to that nearly forgotten technology of the spoken word. If I wanted to speak to someone [bar Herself of course] I would have to leg it around to their house. No landline phone. No Interwebs. No mobile phones. All would be dead. The younger generations would of course all go ballistic and eventually have nervous breakdowns without a regular feed of Farcebook and Instagram.

Fairly quickly I would run out of food. Having frantically eaten my way through the contents of the freezer [which no longer freezes] and the refrigerator [which has just become a cupboard] I would presumably find that the shops have run out of stock due to the lack of ships and planes. There wouldn’t be much point anyway as I couldn’t pay them seeing as most of my cash has been wiped from computer memories.

So life would revert to basics. I suppose most of my days would be spent hunting and foraging for food. That would be risky until everyone with guns has run out of ammunition.

The whole idea makes Warble Gloaming look like a walk in the park.