I arrived home at the weekend after a few days holiday to discover there was no power in our house.

Walking into a cold, dark house on a wet, stormy night with no electricity and no heating, it definitely wasn’t the homecoming I’d anticipated after a five-hour drive with a tired four-year-old.

She rose to the occasion though – excitedly gathering all her battery operated flashing toys to illuminate the rooms in all kinds of colourful lights and shapes.

It’s definitely the only time I’ve been grateful for the noisy and garishly bright toys I normally spend so much time gathering and stuffing in toy boxes, hoping she’ll forget about.

As I carefully dotted candles around the house and we made calls to find out what the problem was, I remembered with real fondness the times when the electricity was off when I was a child and Mum would quickly light the fire, while dad tried to figure out the cause and we’d all huddle together in the living room, watching the flames illuminate the room and our faces in a warm, cosy glow, with no other noises to interrupt our chatter other than the sounds of the crackling wood.

As a child, being without electricity always felt like an adventure. After all, it’s the adults’ job to worry about making sure the beds are warm enough to sleep in and when that mountain of holiday clothes will get washed. I realise that I’m lucky – privileged – to have only ever experienced such an incident as an adventure, or at least a temporary event.

For many parents in Northern Ireland and across Britain today, it is a daily struggle to heat their homes and cook warm food to put on the table for their children. As I sat in my cold bed the following morning – safe in the knowledge that I could stay in a hotel if the power company didn’t manage to fix the problem before darkness that evening – it was sobering to think about the many people who have little choice but to go to bed cold and wake up even colder, knowing that the day ahead will only bring more worries about money.

I thought about the people whose daily reality is choosing between keeping warm and eating, those who have to survive on £3 for the next five days until their Universal Credit payment comes through, and the thousands of people who must make trips to their local food bank for any hope of being fed. And these are the people who still have a roof over their heads. There are thousands more on the streets, sleeping rough and putting their lives at risk every night. A story in the Guardian this week about an increase in the number of rough sleepers being crushed while sleeping in bins should shock every single one of us.

According to the Guardian, a report by the waste company, Biffa, the Open University and the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management, found the problem of homeless people sheltering in bins had surged in the last five years. From April to December 2019, Biffa employees recorded 109 “near misses” or encounters with people either sleeping in or near its bins.

In a rich economy such as the UK’s it’s unacceptable that people are forced into homelessness in the first place but the fact that there are people so desperate that they are prepared to sleep in bins is beyond comprehension. Sadly, life is not likely to improve for many people under the current government. In fact, the Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts poverty will worsen in many parts of the UK over the next year.

It’s so easy to get caught up in our own lives and troubles and take things for granted. We may think about those less fortunate than ourselves; we probably give to charity and possibly donate to our local food bank. But how often do we feel truly grateful that we can turn on the heating every day and have a shower or bath in hot water as often as we please?

In this current climate, where hundreds of thousands of people are not able to meet those basic needs, spending a few days without electricity has been a much-needed lesson in gratitude for me.