Our phone’s not working. Or not as it should, anyway. It does ring – long bursts for five or ten seconds, but by the time I’ve eased myself out of the chair and got out into the hall it has stopped.

There’s no dialling tone. And there’s no one at the other end of the line, if there is a line at all.

In these days of mobiles and the Internet, it probably wouldn’t matter that much. Except that the phone’s preferred time for howling into our domestic wilderness is anywhere between midnight and 4am, our preferred time for sleep. And of course the Internet connection relies on it. I call BT – on my mobile – and wait.

There is all sorts of to-ing and fro-ing while they check things at their end and, after a few days, a nice man with a toolbox arrives at the door. I look for the BT logo on his uniform.

“Open reach,” he says, and for a second I think I must have inadvertently rung a mobile dentist. But no, this is Openreach, apparently, which is part of BT but different. Only the same. Either he missed the seminar on how to explain away zillions of pounds of branding to innocent customers, or I’ve missed the point.

No matter. He gets some more tools out of his van and then asks me how long we’ve noticed this problem.

I’m about to come clean and say that actually the line’s been getting more and more crackly for a while – about ten years, I suppose – when he picks up the receiver himself and listens intently.

Hmm, he says, in a voice that surgeons reserve for pretty bad news, and bites his lip. Have you ever had trouble with this telephone number before, he asks.

And suddenly I remember that of course we have. About 15 years ago the line going out from our house to the telegraph pole in the alleyway behind was behaving very badly indeed. A man had to go up the pole and sort it out. I remember it because the neighbours were all putting bets on whether he or the gale force wind would come out best.

The Openreach man nods. Right, he says, I’ll try that first, and before I know it he’s back in the van bringing out a nifty set of ladders and is two storeys above me, trying to reconcile a box of tricks that was probably put up there about the time that Agatha Christie first went missing with technology that bounces itself off satellites out in space.

He comes down again after a while and comes inside and he’s still biting his lip.

Would you like a coffee, I ask. He shakes his head politely. I get myself one anyway and sit on the bottom stair and watch him.

He bends down and looks at the little plastic box low down on the wall, and then takes out a screwdriver. Aha, he says, Aha, this looks like it. He pulls out a square of plastic with some wires and metal bits on it. Look at that, he says, oblivious to the fact that most people over 50 can’t see their own hands without glasses, let alone a spot of something on a small bit of plastic.

That’s damp, that is, he says. For some reason condensation is getting inside the box. I glance furtively over at the radiator but for once it’s bare. We are now well into the six-week period of each year when I haven’t had to dry the washing in the hall. Most of the time it’s like a Chinese laundry in here. I hope he won’t spot the wallpaper which is coming away from the wall.

He replaces the box and I bite the bullet and ask what the bill will be.

I don’t think there’ll be one, he says. It’s not your fault. We’ll just have to hope that new box stays completely dry.

I smile and sign a form and let him out of the door.

As I turn back into the hall my foot catches the mug on the floor and I watch as the coffee moves inexorably towards the wall, and the new plastic box.