You may be skint on the local wages, crippled by taxes , blah, blah, blah but still there is always the comfort in kowing that everyone has access to basic utilities.

Couple switch on - after 37 years

A Suffolk couple are to finally have an electricity supply connected to their home - after 37 years.

Pat Payne, 74, and wife Margaret, 72, raised nine children in their farmhouse in Whepstead, near Bury St Edmunds, without electricity.

They used candles instead of lightbulbs, did their washing by hand and scrubbed the floors instead of using a hoover.

But one of their children has moved back in and is paying £19,000 to have electricity installed at the 200-year-old property.

Mrs Payne told The Times: "I think the family are more excited about us getting electricity than we are.

"It might have been nice to have been able to do the ironing or to have a Hoover instead of having to scrub the floor but we got through it."

In fact, she believes not having electricity may have been a good thing for her children.

"Instead of watching television they played together and would invent games or read books," she said.

The couple have lived mostly off the land. Mr Payne, a former farm labourer, grows vegetables in the three-acre garden.

"With our fresh vegetables and not having central heating it's been a very healthy way to live," Mrs Payne added.

Isn't that amazing - reminds me of that series "the Good Life". I'm already annoyed if the power's out for an hour

I've been to Bury St. Edmunds - it didn't seem that out of time

Aw poof - they had it easy peazy.



You're too late. Applications for Outback House have closed.

Pah!!..thats nothing

SA has a community still living in caves... Coober Pedy

oooooooooooo, don't mention that, I don't want to rile Kong too much.
Heaven forbid that he would make a sweeping generalisation that all of Australia live in caves, skinny dip in toxic water and occupy the most evil, foul planet on Gods clean earth.

country, not planet......................doh

Humph!! In Atherton they still haven't come down from the trees.



In fact they spend all day bathing in ponds in tree forks!

You like to live dangerously

goddamn savages, I ask you.....................

How long before we take this back to pond life?........ hmmmm...no... lets not go there, i may incriminate myself

They can't even afford clothes and that stuff in the pond looks suspicious.
We ought to send a missionary in.