Powerhousing IV

I’ve mentioned The Curfew before. I’d like to explain how we got it. No, I mean how we kept it. I’ve spoken about this in the meetings. The ones with the young people in deserted buildings. Recently they’ve started calling it the Only Varsity. I think it’s a joke, and if it is, I’m glad they know enough about the past to make it. When I do talk about The Curfew, the brighter ones say, ‘Why, you mean why, don’t you?’

But I don’t. The why is never important. They’ll always find a reason. The how is important, but we never learn. However many times someone peeps behind the curtain, we fall for the same charlatan’s tricks. Of course, The Curfew isn’t even law now. There is no law, after all, not up here. No, what The Curfew is, is a custom, a fucking tradition. This is how it happened.

After separation – it’s still hard to call it ‘independence’ - the brown-outs started. We were fine for a week. Then there was no power at all. Londington must have been ready for months. The huge circuit that was the National Grid was suddenly incomplete above the Wall - people had called that the Mogg-Rees Line, for a while. Clearly, the infrastructure had been in place to complete the circuit within the 52^nd State long before. There was no surprise about what happened whilst the power was off. Looting, burning, any crime that was easier to commit under cover of darkness. You might ask about the fabled Interweb: I use the term that became more common after two years without it, it’s something spoken about with numinous awe now, like the National Health Service. My – let’s call them students – I am their pedagogue, though I would not use that word about myself now, language is civilisation and – well - the Wild North does not feel so civilised now. Sorry, I lose the thread so easily these days. Though memory is strange, now I feel I have a stranger’s memory. My students, yes, they treat what I tell them as folklore, old wives tales, and the Interweb is just one of them. But here’s the thing; fake news – it still exists, we call it rumour again now. We don’t know how or where the rumours start, but start they do. And grow.

So The Curfew began as a perfectly logical reaction to the power outage and its concomitant crime wave. Of course, we got the power back on for a while, but it wasn’t the same. It was like Argentina or Africa, intermittent, unreliable. Spikes in the voltage ruined what 5G masts and computers were left. It became easier to turn it off, ‘manage the supply’. But The Curfew has stayed. Naturally, if you walk a mile or two outside Old-Town Royd there are small, gated communities with razor wire fences lighting up the sky like a ground-based Northern Lights. I’ve gone out there myself, after curfew. What is life without a little danger?

Curfew breakers like me aren’t always arrested. They disappear behind a curtain of lycanthropes, vampires, barghests, banshees and everything that never was. The things that have always been blamed by the superstitious. Perhaps it’s better to invent explanations, rather than accept that people just disappear.

Be careful what rights you surrender. No, be careful to whom you surrender them. You might not get them back.