grumpyf1

If you ever look back fondly on days gone by, remember this – there was no internet. The past, therefore, sucks big time. Back in June, I penned a column for your edification in which I contemplated the merits of a digital detox, and spending some time offline and away from screens of various sizes. Weak-willed techno-ponce that I am, I didn’t. The cruel hand of fate (or BT, as they’re also known) intervened last weekend, skilfully converting a non-existent phone connection into a full-blown broadband outage simply by sending an engineer to our house. Cut adrift without the internet piped into our home at high velocity, our coastal location and thick walls also means we have no mobile signal either. Bad enough that this occurred over a Bank Holiday weekend, but we also had a couple of days off work too to supersize our time at home. v The horror of being ‘outernet’ struck quickly. We had to go for a walk to be able to report the broadband fault. “Can you give us an alternative...

You know when you haven’t been on the web or checked you email for a few days? No, me neither. Around a decade ago, deciding to go online was not a decision to be taken lightly. Our laptop (significant in itself – we had one web-capable device to share) took a while to boot up, and then there was the ceremonial laying of the modem cable - unravelling it from the reel and stretching it to the other end of the house, where the phone got unplugged so we could bathe in the warm glow of the internet. There was no surfing the web – if you were lucky, after the whistly-tweety dial up noises (and some possible “connection failed – trying again” messages) a trickle of internet reluctantly entered the house like a nervous mouse, ready to vanish at any moment. If someone emailed us a picture, it was time to go and make a cuppa. A 2MB photo would take several minutes to squeeze itself down the narrowband. Still, it was pretty awesome. In 10 minutes or so, we could be looking stuff up and...

Yesiree – If the internet is the information superhighway, I’m currently parked up on the hard shoulder with four flat tyres. When I moved to my current South Cumbrian abode, less than a decade ago, I used to have to unravel a very long phone extension cable from a reel and stretch it from a socket upstairs all the way to the back of the house where the computer hung around, sulking at being kept away from all the good stuff online. This process was bad enough (the windy handle on the reel had broken off from over-use, so ‘browsing blisters’ were a distinct possibility), but even when the cables were all connected, the dial-up modem allowed a pipeline of data to rush into the house at a speed so great that being emailed a photo meant I could comfortably watch all the Star Trek movies back to back before going back to see if it had finished downloading. That’s assuming the connection hadn’t dropped out just before it finished, then started all over again, of course. How quickl...