The lights flickered a few times at the restaurant at the weekend. Our till system went down momentarily. An alarm at a nearby property punctured Sunday evening feels.
It’s been a while since there’s been a power cut here in Oxford, but in India, when Yeshi and I first met, blackouts were a common occurrence.
This wasn’t too much of a problem, as nobody in his home of McLeod Ganj, a small hill station in northern India, was reliant on electricity for their basic needs. Meat and vegetables were usually bought and cooked fresh on the day, which made fridges non-essential. Nobody had ovens. Cookers were fired by gas, which wasn’t piped in, but rather bottled (spot the cylinder just behind Yeshi in the picture above).
Once a week, Yeshi and his neighbours would queue up from 4am to swap their empties for full cylinders. The gas came in 19kg bottles, but when full, these doubled in weight. Every week, Yeshi had to lug his gas up and down the mountainside from the drop-off point to his home. No wonder he used to call me “portable” back then – I guess I wasn’t much heaver than a full cylinder, a very real benchmark at the time.
For Yeshi, living without reliable electricity was a fact of life, and when the power went down he was happy and ready to cook by candlelight, to boil water in a pan.
The only really indispensable piece of electrical equipment in his home was a three-bar heater. In winter it was perishingly cold indoors as the concrete walls were not insulated. When the heater was down, the hot water flask became our life-saver (both items front and centre below).
It’s easy to romanticise the good old days, remembering how many duvets we’d have to sleep under during wintertime and the fun of just calling an early night. But facilities were basic, as you can see, and conditions made harder still by the regular blackouts.
In Gaza, power outages have been ongoing for two years now, paralysing daily life. We often wonder how local businesses manage to keep going during extended blackouts, and more to the point how hospitals and other medical facilities are able to function. We thank our stars that here in Oxford we rarely suffer more than a flicker of inconvenience.
The restaurant is open as usual this week, as follows:
Weds – Fri: 5-9.30pm (dinner only)
Saturday: 12-3 / 5-9.30pm
Sunday: 12-3 / 5-9pm
This week’s menu is up on the website. Drop by for dine in or take away.
Freezer food: stocks are looking good right now – come grab. We’re offering our newsletter subscribers more excellent offers on many items in our freezers this week. Sign up here for all the deals.
Looking forward to seeing you soon,
Julie and Yeshi
Opening hours this week:
Weds – Fri: 5-9.30pm
Saturday: 12-3pm 🥢 5-9.30pm
Sunday: 12-3pm 🥢 5-9pm
☏ 01865 499318
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