Good heavens, what a splendid mess. A massive subsea data cable has gone limp in the North Atlantic, and the internet, that great trembling jelly of modern existence, is now whimpering into its pillow. The precise location remains a mystery, known only to a handful of frantic engineers and perhaps a particularly smug octopus who now has a new toy to tangle with. But let us not be churlish: this is a crisis of the highest order, a real humdinger that threatens to plunge our civilisation into a dial-up hellscape of buffering icons and spinning beach balls.

Reports trickle in like cold sweat down a financier's back. The cable, a fat, fibre-optic serpent that carries the collective moan of humanity from one continent to the next, has snapped somewhere in the briny deeps off the coast of Ireland. Or was it Iceland? The reports are garbled, as if they themselves have been chewed by the same creature that did for the cable. What we know is this: latency is up, packet loss is rampant, and the entire transatlantic data stream is now limping along like a gout-ridden messenger boy on a cobbled street. The great and the good of the telecom world are wringing their hands and issuing statements that read like obituaries for a beloved relative. They speak of 'redundancy' and 'rerouting' and 'contingency plans', which is bureaucrat for 'we haven't the foggiest idea when this will be fixed, so please do not watch Netflix for the foreseeable future.'

And what of the cause? Ah, the cause. That is the rub. The official line, delivered through gritted teeth by a spokesman with the pallor of a man who has seen too many PowerPoint slides, is 'an external aggression'. A fishing trawler, perhaps, its net snagged on a rock and dragged across the seabed like a drunkard's finger across a harp. Or a submarine, a steel behemoth idly scraping its belly on the ocean floor while its crew plays cards and dreams of home. Or maybe a giant squid, the kraken of our digital age, grown tired of the constant hum and deciding to take a bite. The truth, as always, is probably more mundane and more absurd: a poorly placed anchor, a moment of carelessness, a failure of maintenance that someone will be blamed for in a windowless room deep in a government building. They will blame it on 'climate change' and 'increased maritime traffic' and 'the pressures of the modern world', which is to say they have no idea.

But the real story, the one that makes the gin in my glass tremble with delight, is the absolutely pathetic dependency we have on these slender threads. One cable, one single cable, and the entire edifice of global communication wobbles like a soufflé in an earthquake. We have built a civilisation on a network of glorified pieces of string, and we are shocked when one breaks. The great banks will delay their trades. The video calls will pixelate into waxworks of our loved ones. The streaming services will buffer into a stuttering slide show of despair. And we will all sit there, staring at our screens, wondering why the world has suddenly become so quiet. It is a beautiful, terrifying, hilarious moment of truth. The machine has hiccuped, and we are all holding our breath.

Let them send the repair ships. Let them haul up the broken ends and splice them together with their clever machines. The cable will be fixed, the data will flow, and we will all forget this moment of vulnerability. But I won't. I'll be in the snug, ordering another gin, and marvelling at the exquisite calamity of it all. Because the truth is, the internet is not a utility. It is a conjuring trick, a delicate house of cards balanced on the backs of a thousand sea serpents. And we have just watched one of them sneeze.