The next dug-up in our street will be the uprooting of super-fast broadband cabling, giving superfast internet. I really didn’t want super speed. I am not into fibre optic cabling into my home right and up and into the bowels of my computer. What next, an internet colonoscopy?
I want a dug-up for slow-lane life introduction cable, you know a kind of strolling along speed. Is that still around? Is there an underground cable for just strolling?
I imagine a bulldozer waiting around the corner and a friendly man dressed in a green jacket dropping leaflets in post boxes. In the leaflet there will be a kind reminder that super fast living will be closed down. “please make sure you have enough milk and a sufficient supply of potatoes for at least a day or two” adding that a supply of AA and AAA batteries will be freely available from all post offices. Electricity will be available between 8pm and 5 am only. This will ensure that the elderly will be safe from stumbling in the dark in any urgent ablution needs. “Please, keep torches with batteries under your pillows”, the notice further exhorts the residents.
Next day, men in fluorescent jackets and mobile phones get to work early. The bulldozer eats it way digging up all the superfast living cables installed over the last few years and dumping it in large double bogey trucks. When the trucks are full of this superfast speed debris, large tarpaulin covers are hydraulically drawn over the useless rubble before they drive off to a large hole just outside town. No superfast-lifestyle was allowed to escape and cause a blimp into the slower living mode, now so desperately sought by many, especially those of advancing years with facial stubble and worry lines.
They now have drawers full of phone chargers, speed cables, retired routers, hard-drives and lonely looking memory sticks. The owners have long gone past memorising idle websites or E-Bay bargains and are on the cusp of dumping them at Father Riley or the Salvation Army. They are thirsty for slow speed and strolling about on the verge of a bubbling creek. They want so desperately to feed ducks and watch clouds go by.
The dumping by trucks of the superfast life styles into a disused superfast mine was accompanied by police on Triumph 650cc twin cylinder motorbikes. Children were waving little flags along the way. Ice-cream vans selling soft ice creams while chiming ‘Greensleeves’ had long queues. The superfast mine quarry was abandoned years ago leaving a large tailings sludge next to a toxic arsenic-green putrid smelling lake in which nothing moved. Not a single mosquito dared to land there. The surrounding trees were naked for miles around, even in summer. People living eighteen kilometres away claim that at some nights sobbing can be heard from the direction of this steaming acrid dump.
Meanwhile, the residents being released from the superfast cabling are just relishing peace and slowness having returned. Neighbours were seen to lend and borrow items from each other. A small boat of butter passed over the fence at Nr 23 Ascot Road, Bradford. Peals of laughter were heard across the privet fence of Mrs Kensington who only recently had lost her dear husband Dennis to a mishap while plugging in his router underneath the computer desk. He never got up again. She found him near the multi power point lead which was still flashing. “I found him still warm,” she kept repeating.
With this sudden leap into the strolling mode , thanks to the new slow speed cabling, she realised she still might have years ahead of her. Her memory of Dennis was fast fading and in any case he had the foresight to have signed a good funeral plan and left her with enough for years of future milk and potatoes. No wonder she managed a loud laugh. Things are inevitable, she realised. The slow speed gave her insight she might have missed with the fibre optic super fast life style. .
As the evening arrived, so did a new era.All people welcomed slow speed cabling. The Lord Mayer was given an ovation for his foresight as well.
The new dawn of strolling about, feeding ducks and barking dogs had arrived.
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