Our youngest pup Coco, as I’ve written before, is a genius. There is no bias in this observation, it is simply a fact: her name is already down for Roedean, and we  fully expect her to pass the Oxford Entrance exam within the next two years.

For one thing, she devours the newspapers every day. Suitably chewed, torn up and generally analysed, they’re then strewn across the carpet along with kitchen towels and all the other detritus associated with excitable incontinence. As a voracious reader, Coco sees weeing on the papers as a terrible waste of copy. She therefore grabs them with her teeth at one corner, and runs off guiltily to some hidden nook, there to indulge in a unique form of destructive origami.

Sitting here at my desk in the main living room, I have grown accustomed to the sight of the Daily Telegraph business section moving apparently under its own volition from one end of the space to the other. Occasionally she makes derogatory remarks about the Jeremy Warner column, but on the whole she is a big fan of the Mailygraph’s financial writers. She says we’re going to have inflation first, then deflation. She thinks my indeflation theory is a load of old tosh. Children can be so cruel.

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Yesterday morning, our internet went down for three hours. We’ve had wireless broadband here for five years now, so the first problem was that neither of us could remember who our ISP is. And of course, every solution to this problem involved Google…which we couldn’t get at.

There are moments in every life these days when the full realisation of our dependence on comms technology becomes frighteningly clear. An editor of my acquaintance had his Blackberry stolen last Autumn, and his life came temporarily to a close while he painstakingly rebuilt his entire network of snouts, bigwigs, fellow drinkers and police informants. My search for an answer to yesterday’s internet problem involved checking the router, unplugging everything, doing a disk cleanup and then ringing BT.

This was always going to be a pointless exercise, as BT isn’t our internet provider. I went through four sets of two and two sets of five alternatives until the android at the other end said, “We are sorry but you do not have an account with us at this time”. So I went to our joint bank account outgoings….and sure enough, there was the sum of £18.97 each and every month going out to Orange Home. Jan said this couldn’t be true, as we got rid of Orange when I had my big row with them in 2005. But as so often happens as one gets older, this hadn’t happened. It was yet another thing we had meant to do, but hadn’t ever got round to, as it were, doing.

I rang Orange, fascinated by all the alternatives open to me, until pressing the ‘service problem’ number (4 I think) caused an automated message to cut in and announce, “We are suffering major technical problems in your area. We are sorry about this, and suggest you try the service from time to time throughout the day.” Great suggestion there, Orange: I was going to hop on one leg and recite ‘If’ myself, but on balance maybe I’ll go with your approach.

DID SHE SAY “DAY”??????? What, all of it?

Now the real problems started: what were we going to do? We’d already walked the dogs, so that was out. We tried talking to each other, but the conversation was stilted. We’ve been together eighteen years, so I know what Jan did as a kid (ride horses and eventing) and she knows I once had a trial for Bury FC. I watched as my wife developed a slight twitch: she would have to go a full two hours without buying any dogfood online. This was going to be deep-frozen turkey for her. And I wouldn’t know what Herman van Rompuy had just said about double-digit growth in the Belgian economy.

Switching on the television – do you remember how one got exactly this feeling of desolation when the telly broke down all those years ago when tellies broke down because you’d had the same one for five years or more? – I watched in glum silence as the BBCNews Channel covered stories I’d written about three days before, and got almost every interpretation about almost every drama wrong. Then I went to Bloomberg. God those Bloomberg gals  are something else, aren’t they? They’re vixens: everything they ask of an interviewee is a demand for analysis rightnow.

“Yeh well dat’s allwellangood George but howjer see the downside of this paradigm panning outrightnow huh I mean are we in for a bullish few days in meddals or are things looking preddy goodrightnow for stocks?”

“Well Nadine,” says George, “That’s a toughie, you know? But my takerightnow is that gold will see some retrenchment and that could be bad for Ben Bernanke’s prospects when it comes to any more QErightnow.”

“Whadarewetalkin’ here, are we talkin’ folks jumping from windowsrightnow or just, you know, soup kitchens and stuff?”

“Well Nadin,” George concludes, “I’m bearish on window-leaping but long in soupkitchensrightnow”.

Uh-huh says Nadine as George fades back into real life and she turns to reveal another victim sidding next to herrightnow. It was exhausting.

By now, Jan was reading her Kindle, because as luck would have it, she had a new book downloaded and ready to go, no need for internet hahahaha. I thought blimey, everything is virtual now. Or virtually everything is digital now, one of the two. And then I had an idea.

Is there, I wondered, potential for a service that exists entirely outside the internet, where you ring up and ask for stuff that you’d normally get from websites? It would be very easy to set up. You know that bonkers Sky News footie coverage on Saturday afternoons, where all those who refuse to give Murdoch any more money sit and watch as three old lags describe what they’re seeing happen during the live games on their monitors? It’s a wonderfully insane idea isn’t  it – like ventriloquism on the radio.

Well, that’s how this would work really. A bank of operators would be sitting in front of pcs with websites by sector. You ring up, press a number for the sector you want, and hey-presto, you have access to the internet….because the operator tells you what she sees. It wouldn’t be just for emergencies: it might also be for those who decide (as 2012 deteriorates into global financial chaos) that they can’t afford that Sky package any more. It might also be for the poor and old folks who are probably never going to bother with mobile internet, because they have trouble seeing a pc screen, never mind something in your pocket.

You could call it Luddite.com.

But then the internet service came back, and I got bored with the Luddite concept. Instead, I got an email from the great Dimitris in Athens, talking about Venizelos kidnapping old people to melt them down for soap. Or something. And very quickly, life returned to normal.