There is a saying ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’.

For a long time, in days before the current technological age, I didn’t really understand what that meant.

Until now.

How many times, in the last few days have I heard the question, “Where’s my mobile phone?”.

It seems we can lose almost anything else but, without the phone, we are completely lost.

The same now applies to all of our household appliances.

The other day I heard, “We aren’t able to do very much because the microwave oven is broken.”

How did we manage in the days before we had such devices?

I know my grandmother had a wood stove and cooked everything, bread, roasting meat, cooking fish, vegetables, cakes, puddings, even make a cup of tea.  And the kitchen was always the cosiest part of the house in winter.

I don’t think I ever had a cup of coffee at her house, but I have a lot of memories of some amazing food.  No such thing as electric kitchen appliances, or a microwave oven, not in that house.

We had the same experience ourselves when one of the fridge/freezer units broke down, and severely restricted as to what we could store.  Why that should have affected what we ate is a little puzzling, but apparently, if it was not in the freezer, we didn’t have it.

Something else I didn’t realize was the fact no matter how full the freezer was, we always seemed to be buying more food, to the point where it wouldn’t fit, so we were eating newly bought food over what was being stored.

Perhaps, in having all these conveniences, and gadgets at hand, that’s the problem.  We take so many things for granted and live a life that is centred around convenience.

What would happen if those conveniences were taken away?

Certainly, for me, I know, what it’s like to lose the use of a kitchen appliance and having to improvise, but I’m not sure how I would react if we had a real catastrophe.

I try not to think about what it would be like to lose electricity altogether, just a short blackout is enough to frighten us into almost panic because any lengthy outage is bound to affect food stored in those electric appliances.

But, I haven’t lost my phone yet.  Come very close, and that was scary enough.

Let’s hope it never happens.