Well heck. After getting the Holter strapped on at the hospital yesterday I stopped for some brekky on the way home, and then settled in for a low-key day mostly in front of the computer, whatever, just another day. UNTIL 12.30. That’s when the lights went out. At first I thought it was just our street (the fuse box was intact so it wasn’t that) and then shops started closing their shutters. At that time there was still some patchy internet and a few minutes later I saw a comment on substack about there being no electricity in Portugal. Whaaat? That’s when things started getting freaky.

My first thought was… thank god I didn’t get home a bit later and get STUCK IN THE LIFT. Can you imagine? Especially as the electricity didn’t come back on here until 5.30, by which time I would have been dead of anxiety (recorded by the holter). I mean, we had no idea how long this massive outage would last.  Meanwhile many other barrios in Sevilla had no electricity until 10 pm or later. Indeed some areas, such as Almería, didn’t get their power back until 6 this morning. So it was a bit like total chaos or kind of just another day, depending on where you were and what you were doing.

I mean, people did get stuck in lifts (gaaaah) or in the metro, also on trains out in the middle of nowhere. And traffic was a complete mess. Apparently hospital emergency equipment kept things going. In fact my friend Pedro (he of the VERY BEST papas aliñá in Sevilla) went in for knee surgery yesterday morning, the op was supposed to be at 3 pm. Nope. They needed all the resources they had to keep people alive.

Meanwhile many bars stayed open as long as the beer held out, their terraces packed with tourists. Other tourists didn’t fare so well, having to rough sleep either outside or inside train and metro stations. What can I say? It was a real mixed bag experience.

But what it really brought home was the very disturbing reality of how dependent we are on our infrastructures and how vulnerable we would be to any sort of hostile action. Apparently this wasn’t any sort of “cyber attack” or similar, but it was the biggest power outage in Spain’s history and it happened in a split second. Anyhow, still processing this. It somehow feels bigger than what we actually went through. More to come. Maybe.