So, a new month, a new season and a new website. After eight months of careful incubation we launched our new MT site this week and I hope you approve. We pushed the button just as this month’s edition of the achingly well-connected Wired magazine pronounced: ‘The Web is dead’. Jeez. NOW you tell us – after we’ve blown all that cash.

It ain’t dead. Merely going through a trickier adolescent phase – the sweet joy of youth with talk of unfettered journeys into cyberspace is over. Now the walls and the awkwardness are appearing. Like everything else in the world, it’s about money and politics. The Chinese regime – to the chagrin of many – appears able to censor it and there is plenty of Western discussion about the end of ‘net neutrality’. This means rather than open, equal-speed access for all, a new modus operandi is possible where those who pay more – buyers and sellers – will get to their online destinations faster.

I spent the second half of August at our house in Italy where, apart from the pool liner splitting, there was a momentous event. We got online. When we bought the place at the beginning of the last decade for about the price of a reasonably specced BMW 5 series it had no phone. Casa Lola had possessed a line, but that got hit by lightening, which in turn blew a large hole in the roof where the cable entered the building. We made vague enquiries about getting it reinstated, which were met by amused smiles: the last we heard the exchange was full.

But our weblessness made sense when you have a view like this to look at at dawn every day:

You don’t really want to be reminded of the cares of the real world via the internet when you can chat to Umberto the farmer about when he might get his hay in and cook this year’s supply of vino cotto.

The age of innocence couldn’t last. My wife – who owns her business and therefore never stops working – when pretending to go shopping had taken to smuggling her Macbook to the local gelateria in town. There she could piggy back on the wireless network of un amico in the building opposite. But this wasn’t enough. So she got a company to install a microwave dish which links to an antenna over the other side of the valley. (We’re 600 metres up and Smerillo is nearly 700 metres in the sky.)  After an enormous amount of time up ladders, me getting stung by a wasp and technicians dragging cable down tubes via the bathroom, it actually worked.

The results were mixed. My 15-year-old son still got up at noon and then went straight onto Facebook before reading his designated quota of 10 pages of Pride and Prejudice each day. (He still hasn’t finished it.) I found out faster than I wanted about West Ham’s calamitous start to the season.

But there are positives. I’d received a warning from Vodafone five days into our trip that I’d already used 80% of my monthly roaming data quotient and all I’d done was look at my e mail a few times. So I could bin the Nokia. We were able to check phone numbers for a new local restaurant we wanted to try. We checked the weather forecast to make sure a walk in the mountains wasn’t going to wind up in a violent thunderstorm as it did two years previously. We didn’t have to pay twenty quid to ring the wretched Ryanair to ask a question about online check-in for under 16s. We didn’t have to watch Italian telly, which is still the worst in the world.

In a funny sort of way our place’s beauty and remoteness was enhanced by emphasising how far it is from all that other stuff going on. It felt even more like a cocoon. The net isn’t dead. And the dawn view of the Sibillini mountains – always a joy when your 15-month-old daughter wakes around that hour – is still there.