Stansted Power Surge Blamed On Haddenham Hedge Trimmer

At twenty to seven on Thursday evening, in a garage on Stanbridge Road, a man in a fleece pushed a plug into the wall, watched a small orange light come on, and went indoors to eat a jacket potato. Eighty miles away, by his own account, hundreds of aeroplanes stopped where they were.

By Saturday there were two vans on the verge and a woman in a hard hat standing in the drive with a clipboard, talking to the laurel. Grid engineers had come down overnight to establish how a nine pound battery bought online in a plain brown box had, in the space of four seconds, put a surge through the lines and out across three counties until it arrived at an airport in Essex and turned the departure boards a long and mournful orange.

The man has spent the days since standing in his doorway telling anyone slowing down outside that the battery was only on about a third, that he has had the trimmer for six years without incident, and that the laurel at the back needed doing before the clocks changed and the light went. A neighbour two doors along, who grows dahlias and had been watching from her drive, said she saw the garage light dip and thought nothing of it until the news came on.

"He has always been a bit much about that hedge," she said, "but I did not have him down as a man who could reach Essex."

On Sunday the battery was confiscated by the Ministry of Defence. Two men in soft shoes came up the drive with a grey case lined with foam, signed something on the bonnet of their own car, and left with it at a walking pace that the whole road found more frightening than running. The paperwork pushed through the letterbox afterwards reclassifies the battery as a weapon of mass destruction, which makes a garage on Stanbridge Road, as of this week, a site of strategic interest to a country that cannot get a train to Aylesbury after nine.

A defence analyst explained on the radio that the threshold for mass destruction is not about yield any more, it is about reach, and that anything able to ground an airport from behind a lawnmower now sits in the same bracket as things kept in silos. Asked whether the trimmer itself was dangerous, he said the trimmer was not the point, in a voice that suggested the trimmer was very much the point and was simply above our clearance.

The man's wife has started answering the door, which is how a street knows the seriousness of a thing, and nobody has told him when, or whether, he gets it back. He has asked twice. What he would like, he says, is for somebody in a lanyard to put in writing that he is permitted to finish the hedge, and the laurel, now the only party to this with nothing to apologise for, has gone another week uncut while the free world considers its position.