There was a brief power cut a couple of minutes before, then a loud & deep sounding bang, like an explosion at a distance. We wondered if it might be a sonic boom (jets are doing daily training runs overhead) but the power cut including phone signal that came first was odd.
Was it close enough to “lights out” to have been sound travelling from the substation explosion that cut the power?
No, the time difference was a couple of minutes. Good idea though.
I had a bang here yesterday at 12.13h, the house shook just like it did when Concorde flew over our house at exactly 10pm every night in Brittany. I looked on the seismic sites for the region and nothing since earlier in the year and then remembered there is a quarry on the banks of the Tet about a mile from here and they could have been blasting rock. We used to get that a lot in the old commune as the main huge quarry was about two miles away and you knew when they were blasting as the road would be blocked by the gendarmerie and a notice in the local paper
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So whatever the booom came from was about 40 kilometres away 
I’d like to think something making a boom you can hear from 40km would feature on the BBC.
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Maybe the boom was the BBC?
Yes it would probably need to be be fairly spectacular.
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Do you have foxes where you live?
No, wait, that would make two booms.
As opposed to a boom and two bangs.
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I just asked google how far away “it” would be if it took 2 mins for the boom to arrive…
We were taught to count slowly and each number was the number of miles.. 
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“One thousand… two thousand…”
I reckon it was an experimental exploding penguin being secretly tested by the French Army that de-beaked itself prematurely.
But I could be wrong. 
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I was told something similar, though you divided by 7 somewhere along the way. And wrong, I think!
Sound travels at ~343 m/s, or about 1km in 3 seconds. Light can be taken for this purpose as instantaneous.
So count seconds and divide by 3 for the distance in km.
Surely there is an appli somewhere!
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Good grief.. no more electronic gadgets… please!
my counting is sufficient… and I can (almost) hear/identify thunder from at least 1000km 
certainly better than my phone which keeps telling me “lightning has been noted close to you” (rubbish)… “rain” (and/or) “storms” will stop soon… when we’ve got nuffink at all…
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A power failure could occur and the transformer could take a while to heat up enough and blow its lid … Hence the delay. So it could be very local
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@Ancient_Mariner
@Dan1 might have the answer… 