Dongling in La France Profonde

Ever since lightning struck maliciously at the Mill two summers back changing in a smoky instant our Livebox into a deadbox, we have lacked a broadband connection on holiday. It’s simply not worth re-installing and maintaining the connection. Nevertheless, to live without broadband these days is becoming miserably impossible.

Quite apart from the need to respond to urgent enquiries from our small business back home, broadband is essential these days to settle arguments over the dinner table (I’ll just Google that) even indeed to prepare dinner in the first place, the WiFi laptop having long since displaced the stained recipe book as the fount of knowledge on matters culinary.

My good friend Rosie, has partially overcome this broadband problem by buying a dongle - a little rectangular box of electronics that plugs into your computer and gives you broadband through a mobile phone signal.

I say partially because, being a water mill and at the bottom of a steep forested valley, the Mill is just about the only place in France out of range of a mobile phone mast. No matter, climb out of the valley and there you are.

Rosie bought her dongle in Britain, which posed another problem - not technical this time, but financial. With charges for log-on and roaming the British dongle is hideously expensive to use abroad.

So I thought I would go one better and cleverly buy a French dongle to use in France, which operation I had thought would be easy. Well you would wouldn’t you in these days of internet? I had reckoned without the pervasive tentacles of French bureaucracy.

Still in Britain my first hopeful stop was Orange’s French website. There I recognised just the thing, advertised at a mere €9 (£8.50), pay-as-you-go with two hours of internet access included. ‘Could I buy this,’ I asked the helpful enquiry line? ‘Yes,’ they said, provided we can deliver it to you in France. Just fill in your details and we’ll despatch it to the Mill forthwith.

But ‘the details’ included, as an obligatory field, my city of birth and its ‘département;’ I was born in Edinburgh, I told the enquiry line and despite the best endeavours of Napoleon, Mid-Lothian was not a ‘département,’ the last time I looked. ‘Just enter 99, then,’ came the reply. So I did. Obvious really!

I filled in my credit card details as well and duly clicked on the ‘place order’ button, only to receive a message that the site was ‘presently’ unavailable. As I groaned away at this setback, up popped a helpful text box that said ‘I’m Julie - can I help you?’ or words to that effect. ‘Yes,’ I said, clicking and sending. ‘Julie’s’ response was then to crash my computer.

Now I have a Mac and it takes a virtual earthquake to crash a Mac, but Julie managed it three times. Whenever I laboriously filled in my details and tried to order my dongle, ‘Julie’ would pop up like a siren from the ‘presently unavailable’ site luring my poor Mac on to the rocks of cyberspace.

When I told the help line, they suggested I bought my dongle in an Orange shop in France.

So there I was in in the beautiful medieval town square of Figeac, famous for being the birthplace of Champollion, the hieroglyphic decipherer, queueing up to buy my dongle in the ultra modern ‘boutique Orange.’

They would be glad to help they said, and yes they had plenty of dongles in stock. However I should have to pay €39 but, no matter they would refund €30 to my bank account. ‘Do you have a French bank account?’ asked the assistant. Er.....no!

In that case, she said rolling her eyes, I can’t sell you a dongle. We have to identify you through your bank account and a British one wouldn’t do.

It was why the website was ‘presently unavailable’ she added almost apologetically.

Things were starting to take on a Pythonesque tinge. This is the European Union, I wanted to say. Where we are all encouraged to move about and work freely across a vast single market and you won’t sell me a pay-as-you-go product without a French bank account?

I was raging. Orange had told me I could have a dongle. I had promised people I would be available on email. Time was passing. I sat down at a café table to ponder, head in hands and near to tears in sheer frustration.

I had brought the Mac with me to the Orange shop. Something made me open it - but what was this? The emails were flooding in. The gods had relented. Maybe I didn’t need the dongle after all. Wonderful! Well, up to a point.

We learnt subsequently that most libraries in France provide free public WiFi - though not all the time. Don’t bother trying in the evening - or on a public holiday. Nevertheless, provided I could find a library during working hours I could reasonably hope to connect with the wider world.

This had some advantages. I spent a very happy hour working on despatches from the further flung parts of my little empire while sitting in the open-air under the chestnut trees, outside the library in the pilgrimage fortress of Conques which we happened to be visiting. But I needed something closer to home.

Searching for the library in Maurs, and rehearsing my tale of dongle-woe to Rosie and her husband, a kindly Englishman interrupted our conversation. ‘Try SFR,’ he said. SFR being an alternative provider of mobile telephony. But of course there was no SFR shop. At least not in Maurs.

Still the next day we were bound for Cahors, a town large enough for us to be reasonably assured of finding an SFR shop. And there I actually succeeded in buying an SFR dongle, though not before completing a mountain of paperwork with the photocopier pressed into service and no less than three sets of documents to be sent off in due course, including two by me.

Why? This was a pay-as-you-go dongle. No contract. Why do they need to know all my details - identity, addresses, bank, copies of invoices, barcodes and so on? The transaction must have taken a good half an hour and cost three times more than chez Orange - if, that is, I had managed to buy a dongle chez Orange. Moreover, I was still faced with this silly system of having to pay them twice the cost of the product and then having €30 returned to me through my bank account, a procedure in which I had little faith at all. Still, at last I had my dongle.

But still the gods had not finished toying with me. The dongle came with instructions - nicely illustrated computer screens in both PC and Mac versions. Unfortunately, when I plugged it in after the three hour wait that I had been advised would be necessary the screen that my computer threw up did not correspond at all to any of the screens in the pamphlet. Worse, the computer was asking for a password, which I had not been given.

Meanwhile, the dongle just kept blinking its little light, looking all white and smart. Efficiency itself if it would only work.

Oh dear! I tried loading the CD that came in the pack. That seemed to do more harm than good. Mac was now throwing up a complicated message telling me that there was an error reading the ‘statement heading message,’ whatever that meant.

I went back to square one and rebooted. The error message disappeared, but the screen insistently demanded a password. My eyes brimming with frustration I typed in at random my Mac password.

And behold! The dongle which had been blinking lazily went suddenly into overdrive, flashing like a thing demented. Windows appeared and disappeared on my screen telling me that data were being downloaded and installed. Suddenly it was all done. We were in touch with the world. I felt as though I had climbed Everest!

There was still the little problem of accessing a signal at the Mill. But there’s a back road that leads up the mountain towards Mourjou. Half way, almost enveloped by the spring flowering yellow broom, is a convenient ledge from where you can look out over the adjoining valley. There, on a little hillock, stands the ruined Chateau de Merle.

Merle means blackbird in French and Blackbird Castle is perhaps not a bad name for the site of a mobile phone mast. Sitting on this ledge I found a signal.

The picture shows me in this bucolic wilderness, looking, I think, at Purple Coo. Needless to say I still have yet to receive my €30 of ‘rémise.’ But at least I have a working dongle.