A flash outside lifts my eyes from the flicker of the screen to the dull dark Newcastle skies and the fat drops of rain on the office windowpane.

I won’t cross the Town Moor tonight. Just the thought of being exposed on that familiar urban pasture in this weather creates a pit in my stomach. So I cycle home down the back streets of Gosforth. Hoping the tall houses and trees will be more attractive to the malevolent electrostatics than my hunched figure. Still, I flinch like a cowed dog at the thousand and 1, thousand and 2, thousand and 3 mile-off storm. I don’t swear. My eyes are on the road but my mind…

There is a big shock, a really big shock.

It instantly and involuntarily invokes a childhood memory. A violent and dangerous jolt of mains electricity from the bare wires of an old clock at home. But this is worse. 

And the storm begins to play with us. Little shocks are interspersed with those inflicting severe pain. This is not simply fear. I am used to fear. This is fear x helplessness x anticipation.

I have no agency, no tips. no tricks, just cowering impotent dread of the blow I know will come. The shocks are hard, so hard; the next one must surely kill me. 

I count to cope. Not all the electrocutions, that would be too many, just the big ones. Four.. five… six….was that eight? Is this what it is like to be tortured? To bear pain upon pain, not knowing what you can endure or what you can survive, when it will stop. But there is no torturer. There is no one to blame or to appease. This is just physics.