Ian McMillan: Take my word, the problem is at their end

Uncle Charlie would get cross and hit the top of the telly with his shoe. His left shoe, as it happens. Maybe he saved his right shoe for the radio. He'd belt the telly slowly and rhythmically like he was hammering a fence post into solid ground. He'd grunt with the effort and gasp "the flaming thing!" under his pit-ravaged breath. My Auntie (she was really Auntie Gladys but we only ever called her Auntie) would look on impassively until Charlie tired himself out and it still looked like you were watching a nature programme about the Arctic Circle.

Once Charlie had slumped back into his heat and begun to mop his brow with a flag-sized handkerchief, Auntie said what she always said: "It's their end. There's nothing you can do about it because it's their end." Uncle Charlie would throw his shoe on the floor in disgust and shout "Their end!" with a harsh venom that shocked me as I sat there reading The Sparky.

Their end. Nothing to do with the television set: something that you can't control in a building far away full of people in white coats clutching clipboards. In the far corner of Their End, science-fiction machines clanked and buzzed and occasional sparks flashed in the heavy air.

I thought about Auntie and Uncle Charlie this week when my internet connection started going funny and I found myself mouthing the mantra: "It's their end. It must be their end." There was still a room somewhere full of people in white coats and clipboards. Their End.

I wish there was a live camera on me now as I wrote this. You'd find it amusing. As I type, I'm rattling out a couple of words and then I'm getting up and looking at the box under the table at the far end of the room that somehow tells me that I'm connected to the internet.

Those of you with what some people still insist on calling The New Technology will know what I'm on about: it's got three green lights on it and when the three green lights are on it means that you're attached to cyberspace. Normally the three green lights just glow steadily like jewels. Occasionally they flicker, and somebody who knows about these things once told me that they're flickering because they're searching for a connection, or something. Usually they're just there, unnoticed, unremarkable.

Until they go wrong. The other day I noticed they were all flickering like somebody blinking in a dust storm. Then one light went out, then the other, then all three. I felt like an astronaut doing a moonwalk who had suddenly been cut adrift from the mothership and was beginning to drift into the silent and unfriendly edges of the Solar System.

Well, maybe not that bad. But I was disconnected! How could I do my work? How could I research and write and send things off and... and... everything else I do?

Then, the lights began to flicker again and they gradually came back on, one by a one. A green light. Two green lights. The third green light remained stubbornly off. It flickered in a half-hearted way. It looked like it wasn't trying very hard. It flickered grudgingly and in a way that round here they'd describe as mardy. It flounced into a life like a teenager who'd been asked to turn their music down. And the three lights were on again, and there was joy in the McMillan household.

But only for a short time. Throughout that day, the lights kept going off, only for a few seconds, and then coming back. I became obsessed with looking at the lights: check the live camera, you'll see that I've looked at them five times while I've been writing this. I get up in the early hours for middle-aged man's reasons and I sneak downstairs and the lights look at me like eyes. Or maybe they don't, and I stand there in the darkness until they come back on.

I told my wife and she said: "It must be their end." Not for the first time, we became Auntie and Uncle Charlie. I've rung somebody up and

they said there was nothing wrong with the connection but I'm still convinced it's their end. They're sitting there laughing behind their clipboards because they can see me on some kind of screen and I'm anxiously looking at the green lights and they're falling about and weeping with laughter. Let me just go and get a shoe. A left one.