A chef at a luxury Aberdeen hotel had to rush back home to use his own kitchen after the venue was hit by a second power cut in a week.
The blackout affected nearly 1,270 homes and properties in the Countesswells, Craigiebuckler and Airyhall area from about 11.50am to 2pm on Saturday.
It followed a similar outage last weekend, which was caused by a lightning strike.
One of the affected properties was the five-star Marcliffe Hotel and Spa at Pitfodels, which also lost power during last weekend’s incident.
In the latest incident, the hotel was without electricity for about 90 minutes during its afternoon tea servings.
Owner Stewart Spence said his son, Ross, who is head chef at the hotel was forced to prepare some of the food at home.
He said: “It was just before lunch time and we had something like 28 afternoon teas booked.
“It was unbelievable, because we knew last week’s had been caused by thunder and lightning as you felt the building shake.
“The chef, who lives in Cults, took the scones back to the house to use his oven and we had a stove that we used to boil water.
“But, to be honest, the hydro board were very quick and did a good job, it was just an inconvenience.”
The hotel had power restored in time to host a civil engineers dinner, which was attended by 270 people.
Scottish and Southern Electric (SSE) sent engineers to the area to try and restore power.
All affected properties were back online within a couple of hours but it was not clear what had caused the issue.
A spokeswoman for SSE said: “We apologise for any inconvenience that this has caused to our customers and thank them
for their patience while our engineers worked to restore power.”
