The Survival Kit Was Missing a Beer

Many jokes were made a month ago about the European Union's survival kit, but in hindsight, the EU Commissioner for Crisis Management and Equality, Hadja Lahbib, was not far off when she started pulling various gadgets from her bag like a magician with a hat. Because this Monday, when the great blackout left the whole of Spain without electricity, people dusted off their battery-powered radios, missed cash, and rushed to the nearest Chinese shop to buy batteries of all sizes, matches, lighters, and a flashlight.

A sort of domestic apocalypse was experienced on the streets of Spain. There was uncertainty, even fear, but not enough to empty the terraces. The fear of warm beers and melting ice outweighed the potential threat of the end of the world. The paradox was that in the big cities, the streets were filled with movement and life.

Universities closed, schools brought forward their schedules, and a swarm of adults and children who are usually at work or school at midday were walking on the sidewalks, heading home.

With the traffic lights out, they crossed the streets as one does in Italy when approaching a zebra crossing: with courage and trust in the drivers' goodwill. As if it were the start of summer, the major roads, like Madrid's M-30, experienced an unexpected 'operation exit' in April, which local and national police, called urgently, tried to bring some order to.

At the same time, getting a taxi in Madrid was like playing Russian roulette. First, because there weren't many (many drivers preferred to park their vehicles due to the risk of accidents). Then, because reaching the destination could be even more complicated than any other day in the already challenging capital. And finally, because card machines weren't working, and cash was scarce, so the fare ended up being a negotiation between the taxi driver and the passenger.

Whether it was the prophecy of Nostradamus's Black Pope, Putin turning off the lights to start World War III, or a brother-in-law who had told me this would happen... "I've known for a while that something like this would happen," said Pilar Arribas while chatting with a group of students who had stopped with her to try to get her small battery-powered radio to work. "I was warned about this story a while ago, that there would be a general blackout. We are at war," she insisted, also worried about her 94-year-old mother. "She's alone in a village of 70 inhabitants in Segovia, and I haven't been able to talk to her," she recounted, with a hint of anguish.

A few meters down, Miguel, a Venezuelan working in a hospitality establishment in Madrid's Quintana neighborhood, boasted of his experience in such events. "In Venezuela, this happens a lot, and we all have our generator," he said while serving the next beer. In reality, all Spaniards now have experience with the end of the world: the pandemic, Filomena, the La Palma volcano, and the consequences of the Ukraine war have turned the exceptional into the normal.

And in such cases, prudence always recommends going to the supermarket. Queues, not too long, but queues nonetheless, began to appear in the establishments. In some of them, there was a shortage of bread, milk, and canned goods, but not toilet paper, the star product of COVID-19. Like in the early days of March 2020, supermarket carts were filled, with one peculiarity: credit cards, which have ruled the cash registers for the past five years, were useless this time.