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By Root 462 0

moment, a sister hotel in Bucharest was drawing power from a station – probably the nuclear plant at Cernavod – to chill the minibars in its fifty-two en suite rooms. An inn in Uruguay was lighting its twenty-four-hour mini-golf course with current produced by a hydroelectric station at Salto Grande. And in the case of an Alpine lodge in the Tyrol, a pylon with a dense lattice construction had even sneaked into one corner of the brochure picture. I concluded that there were few troubling situations in contemporary life from which one could not distract oneself by wondering where the electricity had arrived from.

A storm began outside. The line became admirable out in the marshes, suffering the darkness and the North Sea winds with equanimity. A lone lamp was switched on in the garden, at the far end of a leaf-littered pool. It swayed in the wind, a satisfyingly obvious symbol of stoicism in adversity. I thought of the other signs which might still be illuminated across this part of Kent, in front of petrol stations, motels, pet-food suppliers and garden centres.

I thought too of our indifference towards the electricity network. The only humans truly in any position to feel grateful towards it were likely to have died a long time ago, in the 1950s, for it is rare to admire a technology which was already well established when we were children. The bulb is dependent for its prestige on a contrastive grown-up memory of the candle, the telephone on that of the carrier pigeon, the plane on that of the steamship, suggesting that histories of technology should usefully identify not only when a particular innovation was introduced, but also, and more interestingly, when it was forgotten – when it disappeared from collective consciousness through familiarity, becoming as commonplace and unremarkable as a pebble or a cloud.

It is hard to say when this stream of cheerless and increasingly nonsensical thoughts came to an end, but it was dawn when I awoke, slumped in an armchair, wrapped in my coat, with the copy of the hotel brochure open on my lap at an entry on a mountain-side hotel in Andorra, almost certainly powered by a hydroelectric plant near La Massana.

6.

We checked out early and regained our line. It was so dark that the day appeared to have given up on itself. Along the roadside, street-lamps flickered, their automatic sensors torn between respecting the hour and bowing to the implausibly low light-levels they detected.

Our line intersected with the route of the old Roman Road into London, but rather than heading directly into the capital, it instead meandered around the Medway towns of Gillingham, Chatham and Rochester. The horizon closed in. Settlements leaked into one another, creating a landscape without discernible beginnings or ends. We passed equestrian centres, schools of osteopathy and flower-bedecked roadside shrines to young men with oiled-back hair and young women with startled pleading eyes. There were boastful signs in shop windows – ‘Bring us your quote – we’ll beat it’ – and others which spoke with poetic concision of intrigues sufficient to animate an epic drama: ‘Car wash: under new better management’. In a launderette in Chatham, we ate sandwiches to the comforting smells and rhythms of drying bed linen.

Next, the line passed through North Halling, and a mock-Georgian housing estate where Ian spotted that three of the houses had small brass windmills in their driveways. He was reminded of a Dutch book whose moral he often returned to: De Schoonheid van hoogspanningslijnen in het hollandse landschap, written by a couple of academics from Rotterdam University, Anne Mieke Backer and Arij de Boode. The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape was a defence of the contribution of transmission engineering to the visual appeal of Holland, referencing the often ignored grandeur of the towers on their march from power stations to cities. Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasised that these early industrial