Fluid electricity

Ever since I moved to the great foreign lands of abroad, away from comforts and habits at home, some things have held particular fascination for me. One I've described the magic of before is self service checkout (still to this day a thrilling experience!), and now the time has come to marvel over leaking electricity. This is a concept that as far as I can grasp is only a problem in these islands, and may stem from the fact that the power produced here is a particularly flighty form of coal power. Or maybe it is just that they don't trust this new-fangled business of light and heating directly from the wall.

In any case, the fact that Irish and British people apparently think that electricity will steadily drip out of the sockets and add up on the monthly bills unless they turn it off at the root, is a continuous source of wonderment. So they have installed switched sockets, everywhere. I mean everywhere. Keep calm and carry on, lie back and think of England, and remember to turn off the socket switch. In one simple motion, no power will find it's way through to your heater or your TV or your bedside lamp. And no nasty leaks, you will want to make sure that the electricity company fat cats don't get hold of your hard earned money, for power you didn't even use. So the socket switch is ubiquitous. They come in all shapes and colours, and are often joined by fused plugs (in case the leaking electricity proves too much for the appliance, just blow the fuse in the plug so that you don't have to replace the whole thing. Pure genious!).

But laugh as I may, and with a slight condescending nod of the head I may look at these paranoid creatures and their primitive ideas of fluid electricity, it now seems more and more that the idea is actually very good. No pulling out plugs left, right and centre before going on holiday, to ensure that your telly doesn't blow up in case there is a storm while you are gone (people still do that, right?). Just do a round of switch-switching, and you can leave the cables in there as much as you want. No more dragging the fridge out in the middle of the floor to turn it off when you decide to go au naturel for a week (OK, nobody does that!). No need to haul out a whole freezer to get to the wiring in the back to defrost, all you need is to switch off that handy, external socket on the wall, and poof! Electricity be gone. I'm amazed, not at the idea of leaking power (you don't need to turn the switch off when there is nothing in the socket. You just don't.), but at the practical nature of this genious device that maybe we should export further, to an electricity-poor Norway in wintertime, for instance. Turn off the driveway heater with the turn of a switch!

As my friend the Wichita Lineman Glen Campbell would say: Such are the dreams of the everyday housewife. But switched sockets, not just a dream.