I sing the hobby electric.(THE STRAGGLER)

MY wife, a very frugal person, ever on the lookout for household savings, recently instructed me that we must unplug all electric devices when we are not using them. What, the TV? Yes, the TV. Computers? Yes, computers. The standard lamps? Yes, the standard lamps. Apparently she had read something in a magazine about how much electricity appliances use when standing idle. I am not sure she got it right, though.

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"The electricity leaks out if you keep the appliance plugged in," she instructed me.

"In that case, wouldn't it just leak out of the empty wall receptacles anyway?" I asked.

She had no answer. I did not feel myself on very sure ground either, so I did not pursue the topic further. For a couple of days I tried to comply with the new directive, but all sorts of obstacles showed up. The plug to the microwave is well-nigh inaccessible in a crevice behind the kitchen cabinets. The computers all have uninterruptible power supplies that go into a frenzy of demonic beeping if unplugged. Nobody could figure out how to stop the beeping; nobody could find the instruction manual. The laptop is plugged in for recharging when not in use. The standard lamp receptacle is behind our very heavy sofa ... and so on. Now, a week later, I believe the only idle electric appliance we are still conscientiously unplugging is the kettle.

Electricity is of course a great boon to mankind, but I can't say I have ever considered it a friend of mine. My earliest memories of the stuff date from my childhood in England, where, for reasons I do not know, but probably arising from the post-WWII Attlee government's experiment in socialism, British retailers were not permitted to sell electrical appliances with a plug attached. This edict--which would have done credit to the famously crazy Caliph al-Hakim of Egypt, who prohibited chess and women's shoes, and punished cheating merchants by having one of his slaves (the fellow's name was Masoud) sodomize them--meant that the British consumer, having bought his appliance, was obliged to buy a plug separately and wire it up at home, or pay someone to do it for him. My father, another tightwad, chose to do the wiring himself. Since he was the clumsiest man in the entire East Midlands, possessed of large blunt fingers and a short temper, it is a miracle that the Derbyshires were not incinerated. As soon as I was old enough to grasp the situation, I secretly went round the house rewiring all the plugs.

At school, electricity became a subject, part of Physics. It was the part I enjoyed least. Optics was a wonderful game of hide-and-seek, with the mysterious image doing the hiding, though sometimes you could capture it, miraculous and tiny, on a sheet of white card. Mechanics let you indulge a boy's passion for crashing things into other things--blocks sliding down slopes, or across tables under friction, or swinging at the end of pendulums, or wobbling on springs according to Hooke's rather obvious law. Electricity, though, was a dull affair of iron filings and Wheatstone Bridges. The iron filings seemed to take pleasure in doing the opposite of ...