Where Have All The Signal Strength Bars Gone?

The shopping aisle between mange tout and runner beans

I am in a communications black hole. Right now on Monday afternoon I have no television, radio, internet or mobile phone signal. I am typing this in my caravan on my laptop watching the battery percentage slowly tick down in the right-hand corner of the screen. (I'll post it online on Wednesday). Raindrops patter onto the roof from the sodden overhanging branches of the alder trees. Cars occasionally pass by on the road above, or the growl of a gamekeeper's Mule as it heads further up the hill beyond the road. The only way anyone can get a message to me now is by coming to visit.

I'm used to the absence of internet, of TV, of radio. The lack of these things for me is an enormous privilege. It can bring an absurd sense of peace. I don't have the self-discipline to resist the urge to browse the web or check email, so for that not to be an option allows me the mental space to think, or to read, or to attempt the cryptic crossword, or simply to snooze. I don't have the subconscious conflict of whether to stop reading and see if there is something more interesting on Youtube instead. There almost certainly is but it'll have to wait till I'm next in the library, or at Anna's.

Salads for Friday's delivery round

But the lack of mobile signal is new. Well, about five weeks new. I can't call anyone. No one can call me. Texts are now permanently queued for sending unless I travel at least a mile from home in a quest for signal strength. Has the world war three started? Have aliens made contact? Has someone discovered where all our missing biros are? As things stand, I would be the last to know.

Mysterious network outages have happened here before, and then after a few days or even a couple of weeks of frustration, it's shimmered back into existence and pretended it had never been away. I kept expecting the same to happen this time but it seems to have gone for good. Was it something I said? It didn't even leave a note.

An ugly kohl rabi

After a month or so of mounting annoyance I rang Three, my network provider (although I actually use Orange because Three have no mast near my land). Having no landline to call them on I had to remove myself from the problem zone, or “home”. Naturally there have been many calls, not just one. Each time, after twenty minutes of call queues and first-line support checks, I am told that they are looking into it, or that they have identified a problem and are working on fixing it. Then the next day or whenever I am next away from home I get a voicemail saying they need to speak to me. Another half an hour of trying to get back in touch leads me to speak to a different person from the one who left the voicemail. I was told by one man that it's fixed. Nope.

At least it's not just me. One of the local gamekeepers tells me the mast on the hill is “down”, though whether that means it's been knocked over by a low-flying jet or has just stopped working, is not entirely clear. It's the only mobile network in the area. So my neighbours and I are all effectively knocked back to the mid-90's when we relied solely on the landline. For me, without landline, TV, internet or radio, it's the 1890's. I think the postal service still works, just about.

And all his ugly kohl rabi friends. No idea what's made these blemishes on the skins.