When you live in a deep, dark wood at the bottom of a bumpy lane, you get used to doing without services, even in the booming city of Leeds.
No newspapers, late post and delivery drivers ringing on their mobiles to say "Where on earth are you?" And as for the internet - bust junction boxes, fallen branches bringing down wires and something mean called "Dacsing" (BT making us split our line with someone else to the disadvantage of all concerned).
No one is going to dig cables down here, either; which is how Jamie Gardiner comes to be striding across the lawn with his ladders and a square antenna on a pole. Can Firstnet hook up this particle of the Guardian to the main office, at a speed of rather more than our current 32-43.5Kbps.
Its solution is "wireless" broadband, a term comfortingly reminiscent of the BBC Home Service for the middle-aged. The question of whether it should be installed turns on the equally old-fashioned matter of trees, specifically a dense yew that has long outgrown its original role as part of a hedge.
From his laddertop, Gardiner shouts like a modern Lord Nelson in a crow's-nest that he "still can't see Idle". This is bad news. On the 0870 phone number, the first point of contact for would-be users of Firstnet's wireless internet service, our postcode suggested that we were close enough to a mast in Idle, a Bradford suburb, to be OK.
Firstnet's 24-hour people, who also run the postcode test on their website, warned that the next step was to test the line of sight, which was what its engineer, Gardiner, was doing. "We can ignore the trees when you're as near as this," he shouts from his rooftop perch (one client connects with a mast through his house walls, both main stands at Leeds United's Elland Road stadium and a hill), "but I want you to have the best signal possible."
There's still the chimney; and that's where Gardiner finds his sightline, with the nearly metre-long antenna stuck on a 2.5m pole and strapped to the stonework (advantage: no drilling and no threat of damp and leaks). Next comes a simple wire link to the small speed box - easy to tuck away in a corner or on a shelf - and our Apple downstairs.
But what about the much-talked- about Wi-Fi, so that Northern news can be relayed to the Guardian from anywhere in the house (two student sons and Mrs W are also heavy internet users)? Or even from a deckchair on the lawn? That's no problem technically, say Gardiner and Roger Walker, the manager at Firstnet control. But there are one or two things I should know.
Lorne Campbell, the photographer today, pricks up his ears at the notion of a Wi-Fi "pool" of internet reception, based on my house, being used by anyone parked outside, unless I spent extra on security. His agency, just down the road, could send a van disguised as the gas board and download pictures free all day. It would cost me in speed of connection rather than money, but speed is what this is all about.
There's also a potential issue, if we are all going to "dewire", of Wi-Fi replacing the Leylandii hedge as a cause of neighbours' disputes. If next door and up the road also get Wi-Fi "pools", criss-crossing and other reception issues could arise.
More immediately, there is the question of money. The antenna to Idle would cost £170-odd for installation, then £34.99 a month, roughly double the sub we pay to Virgin 24/7. Wi-Fi comes extra. And we would be changing email addresses, a very major pain, unless we carried on paying Virgin for the luxury of keeping our current ones.
Hence a pause for thought, although Firstnet's efficiency and speed (30 installers working pretty much all the time) is tempting. And the prospect of 512Kbps is the stuff of dreams. If we can get our hideous tangle of phones into the package (currently there are four separate lines for computer, home and office phones and fax), I warn the crows who live in our chimney pots: look out, an antenna is coming.
