This is Day 2 of what will be at least five days without access to the worldwide web in the rental home where we are living, in southern France.

The local telecom, like all telecoms everywhere, is incompetent and probably instinctively evil and, after failing to acknowledge any problems for a week or two (“Have you tried re-starting it?”) finally made an admission yesterday that the issues probably are technical and made an appointment for … Tuesday.

Meantime, we plumb the depths of our internet addiction.

When you have no web access, you realize how central it is to your life. This is news to us only because we have been online for nearly the whole of this century. (Yes, this is a First World Problem.)

Is Hail, Caesar playing anywhere near us? Well, let me do a search … oh, never mind.

What are the in-game scores in the Premier League? I can call them up right here … no, I can’t.

Who were the six wives of Henry VIII? Catherine, Anne Boleyn, Anne of Cleves, a Jane, was it? … If only we had a centralized source of information we could access from our home, or from our telephone.

What will the weather be like tomorrow? Can we get an online map to show the best route to a restaurant tonight? Who won the dunk competition at the NBA All-Star Game? Did the real estate agent get back?

When you have been linked to the web for 15-plus years, it is a shock to be denied 24/7 access.

It is bigger shock when your web access is limited to a couple hours a day at the McDonald’s (and its free wifi access) in a nearby town. Have to get everything done for the day while sitting amid French kids scarfing lunch … and if you forget this or that online task, it’s going to be 22 hours before you can remedy it.

To find out if it will snow in the morning, we are watching French TV news — which is going to be 12 hours old by the time the sun comes up.

To amuse ourselves, we are spending lots of time with our Kindles and breaking out the New York Times Sunday Crossword book, and watching lots of old American TV on French channels.

We wish we had the tools of an earlier era, the dictionary, the atlas, the maps, the encyclopedia … but those are in storage on the other side of an ocean.

The landlord lives next door, and she has wifi and said we could piggyback on that … but we are out of range. And nothing we can do with the router will help because it is not getting a signal.

(I know the French for that now. It starts with reinitialisement en cours — reconnecting in progress — and after a few seconds of nothingness comes the fatal message of pas de signal — no signal.)

That bit about addiction? That’s not the right term. It is not a physical or mental craving for the internet, per se.

We could patch together other sources of information — the reference library, the morning newspaper, news radio and CNN.

But we need to be told that up front and not just tossed into a blackout by a system that is not supposed to fail for days on end.

So, the crew at McDonald’s no doubt will recognize us by next Tuesday.

Maybe we ought to buy a couple of Cokes.