ANY 1970s child will remember with fondness the power cuts caused by the miners’ strike. What could be more exciting than candles on the mantlepiece, telling stories and playing cards in your PJs?

Life was simpler back then, with landlines and only three channels on the telly. Fast-forward to the 21st century, with its online dependence and freak weather incidents, and I can see what the grown-ups saw 50 years ago: power cuts are a pain in the posterior at best, a threat to life at worst.

As Storm Goretti approached last Thursday, Cornwall hunkered down early. Schools began kicking out at around 2pm, city-centre shops closed and evening trains were cancelled.

At home, we stashed away anything that might fly about the garden, had dinner and settled in for the night, confident the storm would come and go without incident. Then at about 7.15pm, the lights flickered and with a fizz and a flash of green from the top of a telegraph pole outside, that was it. A quick text around the neighbours revealed we had all been plunged into darkness.

Once the fault had been reported to the National Grid helpline (105), the reality dawned on us. We had no lights, heating, Wi-Fi or TV – and every single electronic device was on low battery.

“But what about Traitors? What am I meant to DOOOO?!” wailed Daughter. She’s addicted, and tried in vain to hotspot our iPad to mobile phone 4G - not a quality experience. First world problems indeed.

I, meanwhile, was using up valuable phone charge searching for a) torches and b) compatible batteries, to no avail. Plenty of candles in evidence, but the lighter and matches were buried in the drawer equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle and, once found, were prehistoric and next to useless. I swore like a navvy as I worked through them with a success rate of around one in 10.

My other half, full of cold, went to bed at 8pm with a hot water bottle filled courtesy of the recently boiled kettle. There would be no radio, just the sound of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse raging through our garden.

At the eleventh hour, our cat - not the brightest spark - slipped outside. I peered out into the gloom to check the rabbit hutch was the right way up.

Next morning, we ventured out to find a huge branch had been wrenched from its tree, taking out one set of power lines and affecting those on either side. The lines were strewn all over the road and pavement like spaghetti; I would learn from a workman the following day that one of them was still live. Given how many people, of all ages, came to have a gander at the spectacle, it’s incredibly fortunate no one came to grief.

The situation was a minor inconvenience for us. My in-laws, who were unaffected, live five minutes down the road and are always happy to see and feed us (although my mother-in-law did ask politely if we could stop taking fresh towels every time we showered). We all but moved in – Daughter actually did, mostly to take full advantage of their Wi-Fi.

Others were hit harder. In Helston, a fallen tree killed a caravan dweller and thousands were left without water following damage including to a South West Water main taking treated drinking water to customers.

Trees also laid waste to homes in Truro and Falmouth, the inhabitants narrowly escaping serious harm. Families with newborns struggled with no basic amenities, while freezers full of food had to be junked at great expense. (Our freezer is tiny and I buy as I go, a strategy that paid dividends in this situation).

Transport around the area was all but impossible as main roads and country lanes were blocked by trees. In nearby Malpas, volunteers got together to open up the single route in and out of the riverside village.

Warm hubs popped up around the county, while on the rural Lizard, a friend despaired at how an enforced switch from landline to online phone provision resulted in a communication desert when the power is down (a whole column in itself).

On Saturday afternoon, the lights came back on. We’d just got cosy when victory was snatched from us on Sunday morning, by another outage affecting over 2,000 homes, retail properties and traffic lights on a key route into Truro. The National Grid map showed how my in-laws had once again escaped this fate, a tiny green oasis in a sea of red.

To all who turned out around the clock to get everyone back on track – from those up in cherry-pickers, restringing damaged power lines in light and dark, to the council highways staff clearing the roads of debris – I say: you are heroes. Thank you.