comforts

how quickly the essentials become a luxury when the lights go out.

Dear word explorer,

Storm Éowyn hammered on our doors in Ireland in the wee hours of Friday morning like a loud and insensible drunk and proceeded to careen through our house with chaotic brutal force. In twelve hours it wrecked the joint.

Thankfully, the public listened to the Irish Government’s dire predictions and Red Status warnings, for only one person died directly from the storm (a tree hit his car). The top wind speed was clocked at 183 km, which is a new record for the country. That’s comparable to a category three hurricane, but technically, Éowyn was an extratropical cyclone.

This visualisation depicts the winds in the Atlantic Ocean on 24 January at 08:00 UTC, as the storm was passing over Ireland. Data courtesy of the Copernicus Marine Service.

It was a terrifying experience to lie in bed in utter darkness (our power went out around 3 am) and listen to howling gusts buffet the house accompanied by an ominous whistling. At several points there were mysterious booming noises and you could only burrow deeper under the duvet and hope for the best.

Eventually, I fell asleep from exhaustion and woke up to sunshine and wild but manageable winds. That’s when I discovered my car was smashed from flying debris, and I had damage to my roof and some trees. I had no power, heat, water or Internet. Temperatures hovered around 3-0°C. Mobile phone coverage was patchy and erratic. Later, hoping the roads would be clear, I carefully drove our other car through roads strewn with branches and realised that the entire region was blacked out. Piles of rubble lay where stone walls used to stand, telephone poles were at a slant or toppled, and hundreds of trees were pulled up or snapped in half. 768,000 homes, farms and businesses were without power.

I had to drive two towns over to find shops with electricity, but I couldn’t navigate into their parking lots due to the traffic jammed at the entrances and exits. I stopped in a quiet area to pick up a slightly better phone connection and managed to catch up with friends and family. Many of them were without power, and few had sustained serious damage, yet everyone knew stories of people who were badly affected.

Since winter storms are common in Ireland, I’ve been through many service outages, but the longest I’ve experienced before was eighteen hours. At the moment, it’s estimated I’ll get power back tomorrow night, but the connection date has been pushed back twice so far. If it returns when currently promised that will be a six-day outage.

On Friday night, with no services, batteries waning, and temperatures plunging Martin and I decamped to my mother’s house thirty minutes away, where magically, there was power and heat, but no Internet connection.

As we drove across a darkened landscape the stars above shone clearly, and I thought about my previous newsletter where I referred to the impact of skyglow upon our view of the heavens. It was a bad day for humans, but the amateur astronomers might have been secretly delighted.

I experienced a moment of deep gratitude when my smiling mother opened the door to her warm and bright house, and we were able to carry in our few things to a friendly and welcoming home-from-home. My brother joined us the following night since he was also in a black-out zone, but luckily he was able to return to his place the next evening.

We vastly underestimated how long we’d be staying, however.

Trying to get online, and to organise paperwork was difficult for a few days. Right now, 142,000 homes in Ireland remain dark, with no access to power/heat/water. Yet, people have rallied and been incredibly kind and helpful to their neighbours. Emergency response hubs immediately sprang up to provide water and power to those with nothing. Friends and family opened up their homes to those in need.

Technicians and crews from the UK, the Netherlands, Finland and Austria have arrived in Ireland with aid and generators to bolster our responders in the most hard-hit areas.

It has been a small insight into the deprivation and anxiety people experience when their lives are uprooted by extraordinary events, either natural or man-made. I can see the logic for having a small go bag packed, because when you have to leave your house quickly, common sense may depart in favour of the survival function of your brain which is viewing pitch-black, freezing conditions as an imminent threat.

It will begin roaring ‘Get out!’ in your mind as you dither about how many pairs of socks to bring while you try to locate your toothbrush by the light of your phone which is fading at 11% battery. In such conditions reasonable decisions about which essentials you require for an unexpected one-day sleepover are difficult, and who knew it would become a longer adventure?

‘Tea Leaves’ by Alma Gogin, York Art Gallery.

Our conception of comforts is a sliding scale depending on our current circumstances. For some people it could be a hot cup of tea, expertly made, with a Hobnob biscuit on the side. That one moment of sensory joy could be a supreme solace after a difficult day. For another person it might be a long hug from a loved one during a moment of grief.

Both a noun and a verb, comforts can be items we cherish or actions that soothe us.

The word originates from the Middle English verb comfortien, which came from the Old French word conforter, and via the Late Latin confortāre ‘to strengthen’.

While we usually think of comforts as things or actions that bring us solace, what’s interesting about the root of the word is that we draw strength from comforts. They fortify us when life is stressful and unpredictable.

And when comforts are reduced to warmth, security, food, and shelter we are faced with the stark truth that it is only with the support of other people that can we survive a crisis.

Judging by the increase of extreme weather events around the world, it strikes me that the wisest step is to take a break from our screens more often and learn to connect with people in our neighbourhoods. I’m not diminishing the value of online pals, but they vanish when the power goes out.

The difference is that online connection is easier, and has a smaller initial emotional cost. Interacting in the real world doesn’t happen organically any more, especially if you are not members of institutions like schools, churches, sports clubs or volunteer groups. It takes effort and time and you have to face insecurities and doubts, social awkwardness and cynicism.

Even though the word ‘community’ has been diluted recently, in English it’s the best term for a weave of connectedness. It’s hard to ignore the fact that people need each other, especially when we suffer a country-wide disaster. But it’s not all about the worst moments, community could be there for us during the fun times too.

In the future we will need to work out how to configure community as a comfort, especially for those who’ve had poor experiences of hegemonic structures in the past.

Can we embrace each other’s individuality and work together? How can we interact and participate in useful and dynamic systems without the need for control or for domination? Is it possible for humans to avoid the drift towards in and out group thinking, of needing people to toe an ideological line? How do we deal with those whose intent is to destroy rather than build healthy connections?

We have had many evolutions of social structures, and we keep stumbling upon the same blocks.

How much will our comforts cost in the future?

Will anyone be able to afford them?

As has been demonstrated lately, an extreme natural disaster doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, educated or street smart, pretty or plain, healthy or unwell.

It will rip the roof from over our heads and force us to confront what is essential for living.

‘The Storm’ by Alphonse Legros, 1943.