Depping at St Pat’s this evening, and the lights suddenly went out a few minutes into the rehearsal.
We were experiencing one of the many power cuts that regularly afflict central Dublin. This one went on for well over an hour, and meant that we had to change all the music we were singing, to unaccompanied pieces. Luckily, however, we could cope without the lights, as God was providing us with beautiful bright sunshine through the windows.
When I got home, later on in the evening, I also discovered that my flat had lost power at some time during the day. I can always tell, as the clock on the cooker resets to zero and starts flashing. I haven’t been keeping tally, but these power cuts seems to be fairly common in the city – about once a month.
Indeed at Christ Church we had a power outage for several hours almost exactly one month ago. We were in the middle of a rehearsal for the Handel Festival concert at the time, and had to continue rehearsing by torchlight. It was fine at first, because the cathedral’s emergency lighting came on – but once that failed after about an hour, the only way to see was with a torch.
Thankfully, on the performance night itself, we kept power.