Mixed signals

6th December 2020

I’ll start off by reassuring all of those concerned about the safety of LCDDB that we’ve had no more repeats of a scintillating power cable and the electricity supply has been comfortingly dull in its reliability, which is more than can be said for our Internet signal.

Those of you who have travelled this journey with us will know that in the past, when we had our telephone connection supplied by the infamous TIM, we experienced periods of blackout when the telephone line broke and Italy’s national communication company showed scant interest in coming to our assistance. Since we changed, a while ago now, to EOLO and a wireless signal we have not lost contact with the outside world completely. What we have lost, however, is signal strength, a situation closely aligned to the reliability of the electricity supply. Let me explain.

The electricity supply has always been something of a moveable feast. Being at the end of the food chain, we have had to be careful about just how many appliances we have working at the same time as the power level, not massive at the best of times, can drop to about 30% on occasions – usually Sunday lunchtime when everyone is boiling the pasta water. So for example, if we have the washing machine on we won’t run the dishwasher; if the oven is on we try not to do any ironing – you get the picture.

Obviously, with the best will in the world we can forget and then the meter will trip off. It only takes a minute or two to flip it back on but by that time the damage has been done… and that is not to mention the times when there is a power cut. These usually come a couple of times a month, sometimes for a second or two and sometimes a little longer, though never (touch wood) for any protracted time.

The damage, if we can call it that, is to the Internet signal. When it has been disrupted it takes a couple of minutes to reset itself but at a much lower power level, meaning that instead of being able to connect anywhere in the house or in the office downstairs, you have to hover around the router so that connecting to the world wide web is only possible in the front room or, if you are lucky, a couple of metres away. The signal will come back to full strength, but how long that takes varies. If we are lucky it will be a day or two; if we aren’t it can be up to two weeks.

We are currently in the doldrums where the router is concerned, a situation that has now lasted a record time. A short power black out of a couple of minutes about three weeks ago was the first thing to knock the signal back. This lasted a few days. The day it came back to full strength coincided with another brief outage and so we had to start the cycle all over again. It was just getting to the point where we thought we were due for the signal to reset fully when we had the problem with the cable, and this must have really ticked off the router. Hang this for a game of soldiers, it must have thought, for since the wire was replaced the signal has, if anything, been even weaker and, eleven days after the visit of Enel, we are still huddling in the front room if we want to do anything via the Internet.

Why am I telling you all this? Three reasons really: (a) it has, again, been such a slow news week that I needed to find something to fill out the blog; (b) to give you the full, kaleidoscopic picture of life at LCDDB and (c) so you can pray for us in our hour of need.

Other than the utterly fascinating story of the renegade router, what else is there for this past week? As indicated above, not much, but here for the completists amongst you is a rundown of the main points.

Monday I had my last regular conversation with my longest standing partner, Iacopo, who after countless applications and interviews has at last been successful in finding a position. Wednesday saw the return of Vanna, albeit it virtually, when after a nine month break she started up lessons again via Skype (at lunchtime, being probably the only moment during the day she can squeeze some uninterrupted free time). Thursday Stephen returned from the factory with a find bunch of onions that Mrs C had given him from the garden whilst on Friday he picked some cachi from the tree. These are looking to advantage in a bowl in the back sitting room waiting to be used – how, we are not at the moment sure.

At that is really it. The good news is that today Le Marche has gone back to yellow, which means, as far as we are concerned, that we can again have breakfast out when doing the shopping and can travel further afield for important items like Bella and Harry’s (by which we mean, of course, our) preferred dog biscuits. This return to yellow has coincided with one of the officially sanctioned Christmas shopping days – not something we have taken advantage off. Imagine what trying to drive off the autostrada into Civitanova will be like, not to mention finding a parking space. Besides, the one good thing about all this is that it must be a month at least since we filled up the car with petrol, and it is still showing half a tank, so there are benefits to leading an anti-social life, whether enforced or not.