I ’m writing this from the North Sea coast, where I’m in a semi-enforced lockdown at my in-laws’ house. It’s only temporary. Like most of the UK, storms Austen and Boelo hit us in quick succession, and we’ve been in and out of power cuts ever since. We were in the kitchen when the first storm hit and we slipped into an eight-hour power cut.

Of course we didn’t know it would be eight hours at the time, so you can only imagine the panic-raid lunch of all the things we worried might go off: blue cheese and cold chicken on semi-defrosted bread; fridge-cold stewed apple with warming yoghurt; and, finally, a thumb of goat’s cheese with some dark chocolate that I found in my bag. Once the rain stopped, we headed to a pub seemingly untouched by this so-called “weather bomb” and had chips.…