So the powercut.

We were, as we often are, in a lecture. This one was about demography in New York City. Not sexysounding but quite interesting – look, all the Chinese people live here, look, people in this area only live there for six months before they move out, look, not everyone is Dominican, etc. So the guy from the city is just starting up when the microphone downs, the aircon dies and the emergency lights flip on. There’s a stir but the men from the city planning department continue. They do finely until a professor walks in looking just like someone with bad / exciting news and whispers into the ear of our attentionloving dean, dean klatell (say it clay-tell). Everyone’s watching, even city demographics are watching. Klatell listens like he’s some kind of all knowing barman and steps forward to grandly interrupt. He may have even reached for the microphone which wasn’t working and leaned forward presidentially, emergencyerially,.

‘This is what we know…’

‘This is not a local blackout – Detroit’s out, Pennsylvania’s out, Boston’s out, parts of Canada are out….’ (‘Oh my god!’ says a girl americanly behind me)

There is a twinkle of mobile phones coming on. Klatell says we can use the phones to check in with ‘loved ones who may be worried’ but then he also says, to those who feel comfortable, ‘go report!’

So I went report. I pounded down Broadway. The University is up on 116th street and I’m living on 4th street. So you do the maths. (112 blocks, 5 and one half miles). I thought I’d just walk on down and talk to people as I went and maybe ring the Independent and see if they wanted anything that was juicy. Everyone was drinking really. The lights were out and beer was getting warm in glasses pressed in the hot hands of people talking cheerily. People bought candles and bunched around radios on street corners. It was good. Thousands of people walking home, little smiles on their faces, watching each other and trying to cadge news off other people’s faces, just checking that we’re all ok, this isn’t the end. I talked to tourists from Oregon who were in the MET when it went dark, then it was a couple from Maine who has just paid $41 for two sandwiches and she, the wife, was surprisingly angry about missing the Lion King because they had booked tickets a good long time ago. When I asked her if she thought the scene in front of her – Broadway dulled to grey and filled with thousands of walkers – was more memorable than the Lion King, her husband, who was called Randy or something, said very sensibly, “It’s impossible to know, you see, the Lion King’s been cancelled, we’ll NEVER know…’ Shucks. Then an English family who were very jolly and from Kent but they’d just been locked out of their very electronic hotel to catch their plane to Heathrow when the lights phutted and died and now their shuttlebus didn’t seem to be turning up and it was starting to look a little sticky. Afterwards, a traffic cop who said things were not too good, fucking hectic, and then, walking with a strangely wide step and with a steady look in her eye, Megan. How was Megan? Megan was ok but Megan was getting married the next day. Walking back from the Plaza where her family had flown into to be looked after and thrilled at the wedding. Megan was twitchy. She looked like she was on the edge of something quite bad. The wedding was planned for 3:30 the next afternoon. We got power at about 1:30. I worry that it got called off just when it was probably about to be ok again. Poor old Megan.

After that home and candles and sitting in the darkened rooms and cooking pasta and listening to the street below where more people drank and talked and the sirens that came whizzing by. By 9 in the dark I was tired. It was a good sleep.