TO CHANGE A LIGHTBULB

I had a message the other day from my mother. This, of course, is not unusual in itself. After all, she leaves me her shopping list on the answering service once a week and then leaves various other messages adding to it, when other items cross her mind later on, which I sometimes even remember to check for. Why she has decided that the very best time to leave me any message is at a time when she definitely knows I’ll be at work and “unavailable to chat” is doubtless one for my eventual squadron of psychoanalysts to unravel, but, suffice it to say that she has her little routines, and, if that’s the time she wants to choose to leave her messages, then that’s fine with me.

Anyway, when I finally remembered to actually check my messages last week there were two. The usual Monday list of “Unhealth Foods” and another requesting a 100W bulb for the hallway.

Oh, as they say, dear…!

As most grown-ups will know, although obviously not my mother, after lighting up our lives for a century or so, the 100W bulb is a thing that has been consigned to history, or, as the modern parlance seems to prefer it: “BANNED!”

I don’t know about all this “banning” mularkey. It seems that nowadays, whenever anyone simply doesn’t like something, instead of just choosing to ignore it they seem to insist on making demands for it to be “banned” as if they somehow think that they know better than us about what it is we want ourselves.

I guess that’s what comes from living in a supposedly “free” and “democratic” society; everything gets “banned” eventually, whether you like it or not. You only have to flick through a passing tabloid (I was waiting to get my hair cut, okay, and there was nothing else to read…) to realise how often “people” are calling for something or other – usually something that seems fairly innocuous or harmless to the rest of us - to be “banned” outright as if its mere existence somehow sullies the air that they breathe.

But I didn’t want to talk about such nonsense today, although I do reserve the right to return to it on another occasion, even though I probably won’t. No, today I was supposed to be talking about bulbs, electric ones and not the kind you plant in your garden (unless you are very odd), and so I must try and keep focused.

The 100 Watt bulb, along with its gloomier counterpart the 60 Watt bulb, have been banned with some vague notion that by sitting in the dark being unable to read we are somehow going to save the planet. “If you want to read in the dark, read by Kindle” seems to be the environmental answer to this dilemma although I’m pretty sure that if you stacked up their “footprints” side-by-side, it takes more energy to make and maintain a Kindle than it does to light a 100W bulb.

Anyway, my mother does not have a Kindle, and I suspect, if my past experiences are anything to go by, having one would only confuse her. What she does have, however, is failing eyesight, and those gloomy new “low energy” bulbs with their fifteen-second delay in bothering to shine any light onto anything that matters, tend to mean that she doesn’t see much of anything any more and, if her hallway is gloomy, she tends to fall over things.

Anyway, despite knowing that there wouldn’t be any, I toddled off to Tesco’s with the weekly “list” of shopping, and stood there examining the rack of new and exciting bulb options that are available nowadays for the very first time.

It’s been a while since I bought any, you see…? Over the past few years, I’ve been working my own way through the cheap multi-packs of bulbs I bought years ago in the days when they weren’t actually “banned” and, so far, I hadn’t yet been dragged into this “brave, new” and, I imagine, supposedly “better” world…

The bulbs themselves seemed to come in all shapes and sizes, and a variety of connection types, and were labeled with some bonkers numerical power rating system that meant very little to me. However, all I really wanted was a simple “bayonet” type that would still allow mum’s lampshades to grip onto its essential “bulb” shapeliness, which is what they were designed to do, back in the days when all bulbs were pretty much the same shape and size.

This, of course, was impossible, but I did at least find a peculiar “tubular” one that would fit into the appropriate bulb socket, and would at least light her hallway, however feebly. Now, the lampshade remains sort of perched there on top of it, waiting to fall off and no doubt trip her up in the middle of some dark night’s dash to the bathroom, before the creeping fingers of the delayed artifice of light can tentatively feel their own way through the pitch darkness.

It cost a small fortune to buy it too… Now I don’t want to come across as one of those “Night out, sixteen pints, a bag o’chips and still had my bus fare home – all for a shilling” types, but those multi-packs were affordable, and I could have got about twenty of them for what that slightly “unfit for purpose” new-fangled one cost.

This, I believe, is something we like to call “progress” although, ironically, it leaves me feeling rather gloomy myself.