ELECTRICAL STORM

So a few things happened in quick succession this morning.

First, the sky went weird. I mean it went the colour of neon soup - sort of bright, green, and sickly. That kind of thing, I thought, happens in War of the Worlds just before the aliens arrive. In that movie, the sky starts flickering with lightning as the ‘Martians’ prepare to ride the lightning bolts down to la…

Flash! The second thing that happened was a quick volley of silent bursts of electrical energy. Yes, lightning. Uh oh. I mean I’m probably the same height as Tom Cruise, but there the similarity kind of ends. And the last thing I want today is to be sucked into the bowels of an alien tripod with a hand grenade in my mouth…

Thankfully there was thunder. It rumbled across the valley as the storm approached. Good old earthy thunder and lightning, the nitrogen cycle doing its thing, and not (as it turned out) heralding an invasion. Even the sky calmed down, and turned a deep but familiar, moody grey colour. Well, it calmed down in shade, but the storm itself was a lot closer. Lightning flashed, the air filling with tingling static. And that’s when the third thing happened…

Just as a particularly brilliant bolt of lightning ripped through the air, my phone charger blew up.

A loud pop, a bright spark - “Yaaaah!” I shouted, jumping out of my skin - orange and blue flames from the corner of my eye, then a small cloud of smoke from the blackened plug socket.

All the lights went out. And I was left with a dark grey sky, hail pounding the window and the smell of charred plastic.

Sammy had already gone to work, but she phoned me later to ask if I’d seen the storm. I sure had.

The weirdest thing was that it was just coincidence. I went out to check - no damage to the roof, nothing on fire, no smouldering remains. In fact, the fuse had blown only one circuit; everything else still worked (apart from the alarm system which started whining after a while). I propped open the garage and flicked open the fuse box to reset the circuit breakers.

It can’t really have been lightning can it? It wasn’t a huge explosion, and to be honest, my phone charger hasn’t been charging properly for a while. Surely just one of those things? Faulty electrical glitch leads to surge? Could have happened at any time?

The sky brightened and the rain swept on. The alarm system stopped moaning, and I popped some toast in. You know either way, I said to myself, I probably shouldn’t keep my phone next to the bed. My hairs stood on end as I thought about it. Like the sleepy world before the first tripod, or the original Woking countryfolk and church-goers of HG Wells’s novel, you might not ever really know what’s about to blow up in front if you - even if it doesn’t turn out to be aliens.

“Yaaagh!” I screamed suddenly. The toast had popped.