Storm Darragh showed me how unprepared my family – and Britain – are for disaster | Gaby Hinsliff

After just 12 hours without power, we were cold, isolated and facing the fact that everyday life is far more precarious than it seems

It was the cold that woke me up. Some time in the early hours of Saturday, as Storm Darragh blasted through our bit of rural Oxfordshire, the power lines had come down; by the time the central heating would otherwise have been firing up, the house was decidedly arctic.

The novelty of lighting candles, chopping firewood and making coffee on a sputtering camping stove carried everyone through the first few hours. But by mid afternoon frontier spirit was palpably waning, along with everyone’s phone batteries. By early evening there wasn’t much to do except agree that obviously we have it easy compared with Ukraine – now in its third icy winter of Russia using attacks on domestic power infrastructure as an extra weapon of war, which puts this minor domestic inconvenience into perspective – and that our digitised lives have become quite madly, recklessly vulnerable to a sudden loss of power.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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