BY JIM WEBSTER

It all started innocently enough. Suddenly I could not download my emails.

Now you might wonder why I should want to. Simple, rubbish broadband. If I use a client like Outlook I can still read my emails when I have no broadband, (like now, when we have a power cut so of course the router doesn’t work.) Not only that but if somebody has sent me a particularly large email, Outlook goes out and collects my emails at ten minute intervals anyway. With our broadband, downloading an email with a lot of attachments is a bit like watching an python swallowing a goat. You can see the bulge inching its way along the wire down to my computer!

Well with Outlook this can happen in its own time, I’m not kicking my heels waiting for it to happen.

Anyway it stopped happening. I couldn’t download my emails. Yes they were all there on the website, but they weren’t coming down the pipe to me. So what was going on? I switched my machine off and back on again. Still it didn’t work. So I phoned BT. They diagnosed the problem, I was using Outlook 2013. Microsoft no longer supports it. This means the antivirus stuff is no longer up-to-date which means it doesn’t know the current correct funny handshake it needs to talk to my ISP. I would have to upgrade, download the next version.

Did I mention our rubbish broadband?

In simple terms, when your broadband runs at 3 Mbps and drops out occasionally you do not try and download new software. When I got a new printer, I had to download printer drivers. The lass on the HP helpdesk couldn’t believe her eyes when it said it would take 45 minutes to download. In reality it took longer but we were lucky and it did manage it.

So there was no way I could download a new version of Outlook, it would not only take so long, but if it broke off half way through I might not only have to start again, but sometimes you have to disentangle the now damaged half version that you’ve got.

So I had to take it to a shop where they’d download a version for me. While they got it, they’d clean it etc. (Old farm house, no central heating, open coal fire, not a computer friendly environment.)

But it is the same every time I get a computer. In the good old days I’d ask for it to be loaded with Microsoft Office and a pdf reader. That did me, and the computer would arrive with everything installed ready to just switch on and go. Now, it comes with the operating system, useless apps I’ll never use, Paint and Notepad. (So I’m writing this in Notepad on a borrowed laptop.)

So the computer had to go back to the shop whilst they found a way of installing office for me. The rule is simple, no office, no sale. (Yes, I know there are cheaper versions, doubtless equally good, and if you can tell me somewhere handy where I can take them in to get them installed, I’m happy to try, but don’t say, “But you can just download them free of the net.”)

People have suggested that I do it on my phone. The issue here is coverage. My phone is on pay as you go, and so far this year (end of June) has cost me about £2. The landline works fine for phone calls, just rubbish for broadband. When I’m out working I rarely want to phone anybody, anyway. And to be honest when I’m working I’m not all that keen on being disturbed by phone calls. Standing in the middle of a field, in the rain, surrounded by dairy heifers, isn’t a good time to talk on the phone. But I thought I’d try my phone using the house Wi-Fi.

Have you ever used a ‘smart phone’ working with 3 Mbps Wi-Fi? Continents drift gaily past you. Still I persevered. My daughter has given me a couple of those rubber ended pen things you can use to press the screen so I have a sporting chance of getting the letter I want. Armed with that and wearing my reading glasses I set to work. I decided to go to Facebook first because a lot of people contact me via messenger. I remembered my password, logged (slowly, oh so slowly) onto Facebook only for them to tell me that as I was logging in from a new device, they’d send me a pin to enter. They did, by text to my phone. The same phone that I was using at the time.

By the time I’d got out of the browser, opened the text, noted down the number, and opened the browser (all at 3 Mbps) the Facebook page had gone and I had to start again. Which of course meant that the number they sent me was no longer current and I had to ask for a new number. At that point I abandoned the process.

I mentioned that I was on a borrowed laptop. During the day there was a Test Match. My lady wife has the BBC scrolling commentary on as she’s working. When I was using this laptop, our Wi-Fi, with two of us using it, dropped to 0.38 Mbps. At that speed, she could no longer watch the little video clips the BBC include, as they just never stopped buffering.

And now there is a risk that the Inland Revenue want us to submit tax online. Now we have no accounting software. I know, you can get accounting software, “Just download it from the Web,” but she prefers to work on paper and I also hate scrolling endlessly across spreadsheets.

But obviously we’d have to somehow acquire the software, at a cost, and pay for the inevitable updates. I’m looking to start a denomination that finds dealing with government electronically heretical and offensive, and we’ll revert to paying them in cash.

Oh yes, and just to put a tin hat on it all, I left my desktop machine at the shop. They cleaned it and then phoned me to come in to do passwords and stuff as software was upgraded. So they hooked my machine up to their Wi-Fi (I bet that made it dizzy!) and I opened Outlook to start the process.

When you open Outlook the first thing it does is to go and collect my emails. It did, right there in the shop and it downloaded them. I looked at the chap in the shop and he just shrugged. “Nothing wrong with Outlook, it’s just that your broadband is so rubbish there are times when it cannot even download your emails.”

Back in the day we used to get dialup. It was cheaper, slower, but could at least download email.

Jim Webster farms at the bottom end of South Cumbria. Jim was encouraged to collect together into a book some blog posts he’d written because of their insight into Cumbrian farming and rural life (rain, sheep, quad-bikes and dogs) It’s available here.