A Summer With Grandfather
Esme had been born in 2034. The Big Failure had been in 2031. She had, therefore, never lived a single day in a town that had power.
This was not, where Esme lived, unusual. The whole region had been off the grid for fourteen years. The country, technically, still had electricity in the major cities. The smaller regions had been *deprioritised* during the Failure's third year, and had never been re-prioritised. The official line was that they would be reconnected *eventually*. Fourteen years was, by now, an eventually that nobody had a date for.
Esme's town had adapted.
The town had, in those fourteen years, become — Esme thought sometimes — a pretty good town. There was no power, but there was light at night: oil lamps, beeswax candles, a small windmill on the hill that ran a single radio every Sunday for the whole town to listen to the regional news. There was no internet, but there was a newspaper, printed on a press in the town's old stationery shop, twice a week. There was no refrigerator, but there were three working ice-houses cut into the limestone hill behind the town, kept cold by their own old engineering. There was no online school, but there was a school in the old church hall, with seven teachers and one hundred and forty children, where Esme had been a student for nine years.
The town worked. It was not the town her grandfather had known. It was a different