Ian McMillan: Getting my head
around
current affairs

The neighbours who were joined on to our house on Barnsley Road when I was young were Mr and Mrs Page. Mr Page was an insurance man, and I often saw him out in his garden tending to his flowers and his vegetable patch; he was also a gent with a deeply practical mind, and so he was the man I asked, when I was about seven, to explain electricity to me. He wore glasses, and I must have assumed that made him clever enough to explain how lights worked and tellies came on.
By The Newsroom
Published 17th Sep 2012, 01:00 BST

I went into the back garden and stood there waiting for him to come from his shed with his wheelbarrow. You could always hear the barrow before you saw it because of the squeaky wheel. When I was younger I’d associated Mr Page with the Man Who Worked in the Garden in Bill and Ben; he was the one who always went for his dinner so that Bill and Ben could come out and play. You’re right: I spent too much time in front of the telly.

Anyway, I heard the barrow squeaking along. I stood by the hedge and shouted, “Mr Page! How does electricity work?” as though he was that iPhone app that you speak to to get the answers to any questions, any questions at all. You know the one I mean: you’re supposed to ask it about the weather in Paris and it tells you. Except, in my experience, it doesn’t know very much; it’s like one of those kids at the front of the class who keeps snapping his fingers and raising his hand when the teacher asks a question, but who in the end doesn’t know diddly.

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To Mr Page’s great credit, he didn’t dismiss the question. He took it seriously. He stopped pushing the barrow and gestured to me to come round to his garden. Now, this was a big thing: I very rarely went into Mr Page’s back garden. He must be keeping the secret of electricity in the shed, I thought.

I stood there next to Mr Page, and from the distance of all these decades I now realise that he’d been using the time it took me to walk round to try and fathom an answer. He couldn’t really explain how electricity worked at all. To start with, he tried to distract me: he pointed to a slug that was as long as a scarf, slithering along the path. “Have you ever seen a slug that big?” he said. I shook my head, then said: “But how does electricity work?”

He pointed to the streetlight, just visible in the gap between the houses. “Well…” he said. I thought he was pausing for effect. He was really just pausing to think. “Maybe you should think of electricity as water. Water running up a pipe.” “Water can’t run up a pipe,” I replied, “Mrs Stansfield told us.” “Yes, well, pretend that water can run up a pipe. So electricity is like that water running up that pipe except its electricity and not water.” I wasn’t satisfied. “But how does it make the light work?” I asked. He said, “Maybe you should think of electricity as soup. Soup boiling in a pan.” “You should simmer soup,” I said, “not boil it for too long. Mrs Stansfield told us.”

Mr Page looked to the sky, exasperated. “Ask Mrs Stansfield at school on Monday, then,” he said. I did. And do you know, she didn’t know either. Can anybody tell me how electricity works? Anybody at all?