I find you don’t realise how much you rely on something until you have to do without it. I’ve been living in my new house since November and I am still without the internet. At first BT had to dig up the road to install fibre optic and it was up and running by the start of January. But it worked for five days then it broke. Oh bitter sweet irony. So the past three weeks have been spent coaxing BT into sending an engineer out, which hurrah, should finally be tomorrow morning.

But somehow this fight has become more about the moral principle than any ardent desire to have the internet back. If I really need to get online, I can use my phone. These few months without the internet has made me feel wonderfully productive; I spend more time reading, shopping is in done in physical shops and rather than check online for tube disruptions, I just show up at the station like an reckless vagabond. I feel I have reverted back to Victorian England, where my housemates and I gather around the fire after dinner to exchange Wildean epigrams and crochet doilies.

I plan to make it to Sunday without actually going online at home. We’ll see how that goes tomorrow…

Could you live without the internet?

Sophie Robinson, Publishing Assistant