Message in a bottle

The phone never stops in a vicarage. For years, I’ve longed for a quieter life. Then, three weeks ago, the bells fell silent. Sally came in to ask if she could borrow our home line for an important call. No chance. Everything was dead. Thank goodness for mobiles. BT confirmed there was indeed a fault on the line, and, apologetically warned us it might take till Thursday to fix.

At first, not having a phone wasn’t all bad. Everything was out on our side of the road, so we talked to the neighbours with renewed interest. The spirit of the Blitz smouldered in our hearts. Great Missenden can take it. We caught up on office filing, and left everything else for when the line came back up on Thursday.

Except it didn’t. Every day I punched in about twenty numbers and enjoyed ten minutes of a bloke playing a saxophone. It was builders down the road. It was a only metre down. It was all about ducting. There were already twenty pages of notes. They were backfilling it today. They couldn’t get access to dig it. They were backfilling it tomorrow. The hole was too small. It was in the wrong place. Always, engineers were working round the clock, and everything would be sorted by tomorrow. By Saturday, ‘tomorrow’ was Tuesday. By Wednesday I wasn’t too sure. All right, said the nice lady. I won’t lie to you. I can’t give you a date.

Ten days in, and everything was coming to bits, from the children’s love lives to urgent job references, several hundred emails people think I’ve seen but I haven’t, meetings where I didn’t get any papers, the fact we can’t really use our bank account. Life flows down the phone line. There’s a thought for the day.

Here’s another. Human beings are talking animals. Being deprived of communication made me angry and frustrated, but I noticed behind these feelings a growing resignation and detachment from the material world – spiritual qualities you’ve got to cultivate if you want to make it as a BT customer.

Back in the material world I began muttering to myself, how long can it take to fix twenty feet of line 100 yards from the exchange? For want of a nail the battle is lost, and millions of pounds of glossy corporate PR amounts to not very much. Even in the South of England, the whole BT thing, incredibly, can fall over for twenty people for days, no weeks, at a time and they can’t do anything about it. On gourmet night at Fawlty Towers you get elaborate apologies, but no lobster.

It could be worse. Our neighbour next door until last year was elderly and very dependent on her phone, far more than we could ever be with our mobiles. Things have got to get better. I’m off on Monday to Växjö, where I can get emails. In Sweden the phones work.