In Case You Were Wondering . . . .
We are entering our fourth week with no electricity, which makes me realize how fast I adapt to things – oh, I don’t mean that as a self-congratulation – more like I get much too comfortable too quickly. It’s pitch dark at 4:30 pm, at which point Alfred and I take to opposite ends of the sofa in the kitchen (getting tangled up somewhere in the middle) under a big blanket and he goes quietly to sleep while I read, knit or shush the mouse (Alfred is NOT as sentimental as I am about animals, and I suspect he would take a dim view of the fact that the mouse seems to have made off with two big baskets of chestnuts which I suspect he’s squirrelling – mousing? – away inside the sofa, judging from the busy noises he was making underneath me last night . . . ) ANYHOW. It’s been raining constantly all month, which means that another chunk of road fell into the river two nights ago. People from Dragobi dug a sort of route through with shovels, so we made it back to Bajram Curri today but to do so we had to cross a bridge with only a thin thread of road (pretty much exactly one car-width wide) leading onto it – the rest has fallen down a precipice and into the river on either side leaving a rather thought-provoking tangle of what looks like water pipe or something hanging in space which seems to be all that’s holding up the bridge on the Valbona side. It’s noticably worse than it was a week ago which makes me suspect that we may not be crossing it again soon . . . Alfred’s gone off to Kosovo to buy 500 kilos of flour as he says “just in case.” It seems to me like 500 kilos of flour might be just what’s needed to knock the rest of the bridge into the river, but then I’m sure he knows better about these sorts of things . . . . Stay tuned for more exciting news of our stone-age adventures when the power eventually comes back. I’m reading up on microhydropower systems at the moment, so if worst comes to worst we might be able to hook a sort of pinwheel up to the car’s alternator and shove the whole thing under the old water mill . . . .