BLOW THE WIND PROFITABLY

Electricity generated from nature... that's the thing that fascinated my old witch Griselda Entwhistle.

  When Griselda Entwhistle received the electricity bill for her little cottage in Swanspottle she almost had a fit. The amount they demanded from her was huge and she only had twenty-five watt lamps and a charcoal-cum-old-sticks cauldron outside (for cooking). So how could she owe so many pounds to the faceless electricity company that claimed to be supplying her little home with electricity?

There’s one thing some people may have forgotten about Griselda Entwhistle: she was a witch, and quite a powerful witch, if the truth be told. Not even she understood where her powers came from but they must have come from somewhere because there wasn’t a trace of witchery in her ancestry (unless you include a distant cousin a ridiculous number of times removed, who had been the Maid Marion of Robin Hood fame). But she had powers and when the need came she wasn’t afraid to use them.

And she decided that now the need had come.

Transport to the office of the electricity company in the nearby town of Brumpton was no problem. As far as Griselda was concerned, anything that was shaped remotely like a besom broom would do and in her anger she grabbed hold of the large golfing umbrella that her old friend Henrietta Blackboil had accidentally left behind after a drunken visit a decade or so earlier. This would do!

She lifted one arthritic leg over the umbrella, scowled as a twinge of unpleasantness crackled through her ancient joints and muttered “by all the powers of Hades, take me to Brumpton!”

It wasn’t that she had to beg satanic powers to help her, just that the idea that there might be some evil force out there seemed to concentrate her own mind �" though there wasn’t anything particularly evil about her. Crotchety she might have been, sometimes downright rude if the occasion called for it, but evil hardly ever.

It was the summer time of the year, so it was raining, a mean wind was blowing and Griselda was soon very wet indeed, and increasingly uncomfortable as she zoomed though the air at a speed hitherto unknown to witches riding mere broomsticks. She might have been perched rather precariously on a golfing umbrella, but its wind resistance was pretty low as she encouraged it along on that dismal summer’s day.

Voltage Inspector Ivor Fatbottom was sitting in his rather expansive Windsor chair when a sound like an amplified pop-gun filled the air and his ears, and a spray of rainwater smelling slightly of old witch splashed over him. At first he didn’t see the cause of the sudden evaporation of harmony in his office, but when he did it’s true to suggest that he found it hard to believe the evidence of his own eyes. After all, there had been no knocking on his door, no sulphuric sound of his acid-tongued secretary forbidding entrance to his room from without, no booming “enter!” from himself, none of the things that normally preceded the interruption of his innermost thoughts (which at the time had been centred on a plate of sausages being served by a blonde and busty wench on a sun-baked beach in Skegness).

“What?” he blathered.

Griselda shook herself, whispered something to a satanic somebody-or-other about getting dry and stood before his desk like a decrepit but angry scrap of terminally-ill but miraculously dry chunk of diseased meat �" which she wasn’t.

“It’s my absurd bill!” she squawked, proffering the offensive document towards him. “It’s too high and I want it lowering!”

“Madam!” he crooned, still unsure of what was going on, “our bills are always accurate! Our meter readers have “A” levels in mathematics, for goodness sake! If your bill says you owe us, let me see...” he peered at the damp document, “… if it says you owe us a thousand pounds, then that is what you owe us!”

“Poppycock!” she screeched. “I’m only using twenty-five watts and that’s nearly nothing! I want you to put this bill right, and I want you to do it now, before I take my leave of you!”

He looked at the bill again and counted up to five on his fingers and raised one of his eyebrows (something he’d spent ages practising in front of the bathroom mirror) and said “Twenty-five watts, you say?”

She nodded brusquely. “Twenty-five watts,” she confirmed. “And not a smidgen more! And my cooking’s done in a cauldron burning old sticks! So how can I owe you a thousand pounds?”

He nodded. “It does seem, let me see, somewhat unlikely,” he conceded. “I’ll tell you what we can do, as you live in that delightful village of Swanspottle, where there’s usually a nice breeze. We can put a wind turbine in your back yard! Yes, we can do that! And whenever the wind blows it will produce electricity and you can take your twenty-five watts from that and sell the rest back to us! You can send us a bill for what you don’t use, and we’ll pay it! How does that sound?”

It sounded rather good to Griselda, and she said so. The whole idea of receiving cheques from the Electricity company, signed by Mr Ivor Fatbottom, appealed to her, and she said so.

“Then that can be arranged,” he said, pompously, and he thrust a printed agreement in front of her. “Just sign here,” he said, pointing at a dotted line.

And she did.

Which is how she came to be the proud owner of a wind turbine which never stopped whizzing around because, well, being a witch she had a certain amount of control over the local weather, especially in her own back yard.

© Peter Rogerson 22.08.16