the 'phone line went, and my life fell apart . . . .

I couldn't believe that the 'phone line was dead, but yes, no dial tone . . . then I thought 'Gosh, no broadband or Internet . . .'

British Telecom, (the landline provider) said 'There's a fault within your property, so that'll be £ 200 to have our engineer visit'.
'No thanks', and we did what we could to isolate the lines and check that it WASN'T a fault at my end. I rang again (from a 'phone box, yes) and they changed their story; nope, the fault was now on the BT part of the line (99.999 % of the link from the telephone exchange). BT could look into the problem by next Monday, maybe . . .

That was four days ago. I rang again today. They would still come, but not before Monday. They would now transfer all the incoming calls to my landline to my mobile, free of charge. Not bad, but not perfect. About an hour later an engineer rang to say he was knocking on my door. LOVELY . . . .

And, three hours later, he has found the fault (a teeny connector loop in a cabinet full of thousands of connectors) down the road somewhere. He replaced the loop, came back to my house, and some fancy fingerwork later (about fifty keys in succcession, on the telephone keypad) I have a dial tone.

So, here's the blog done ten minutes later, and he's off to create harmony elsewhere (up to Archway, he said. That's about a mile away).

A story with a happy ending. I knew I missed the Internet, but I didn't know I missed it quite that much. Carrier pigeon is not the same.