By Jan It began, as many great changes do:
With a plug that suddenly fit nowhere.
On Monday morning, Spain became one big candle party — without the candles. The sun
shone bravely, but solar panels without a grid proved about as helpful as a sailboat without
wind.
For a moment, there was confusion, fear, and the deep discovery that Apple Pay doesn’t
work when the lights go out.
In Madrid, students tried to squeeze a loaf of bread out of their crypto wallets, while elderly
Madrilenians flipped their mattresses and triumphantly produced cash.
“Call us old-fashioned,” shouted 83-year-old Fabián, “but at least I don’t have to negotiate
with my phone to buy a loaf of bread.”
The streets carried the scent of spoiled ham, milk, and ambition.
Supermarkets slapped stickers on their refrigerated goods: “Consume Today!” – a slogan
that could just as easily have been applied to society itself.
And while the government solemnly declared that “this must never happen again,” most
Spaniards quietly knew: it must happen sometimes.
For how else to remember that stability never comes from a socket, but from something far
less flickering: trust.
The real lesson was not found in the prime minister’s statements, nor in the sold-out
shelves of power banks.
It came instead in the form of an old neighbor sharing a bag of rice, a laugh in the dark, a
young man discovering, after one night without Wi-Fi, that the world outside was
surprisingly three-dimensional.
Meanwhile, Portugal, familiar with its own blackouts, watched with a wry smile. There,
people long ago mastered the art of waiting, of sharing, and of keeping an emergency radio
that doubles as a bottle opener.
And so it dawned:
A new time-pain-tick rarely announces itself with choirs of angels — sometimes it’s simply
a bedside lamp that quietly flickers out.
Maybe…
the point is to laugh at such moments, to give your neighbor a knowing wink,
and to quietly realize:
“What I truly am never needed electricity.”