And so it came to pass, in the dark times called Telecom, that the marketing wise men said: "There shall be light!" And lo, out of the darkness there was a spark. And the spark, the wise men decreed, wisely and with great financial reward, shall be called Spark. And so it then came to pass, after a rather baffling advertising campaign, that the spark became Spark.
And no one actually noticed or cared - until the weekend the internet died.
The weekend of Friday, September 5 to Sunday, September 7 was a dark weekend at our house. Two teenagers and at least one adult with teenage tendencies being deprived of unfettered internet access, on a random and unexplained basis, meant that our usually peaceful house became a virtual Lord of the Flies. There were accusations of parental neglect of the sacred internet system; there were demands to change internet provider immediately and with immediate effect; and there were dark conspiracy theories about Watercare Services somehow severing our link with the outside world when they were fixing a water leak on our street - made somehow more plausible by the fact Watercare Services had failed to fix the actual leak.
Eventually stories began to emerge, allegedly explaining the cause of the near-mutiny at our house. It was evil foreign hackers, apparently. Or maybe it was because we were all, as a nation, every man and woman, perving at pictures of Jennifer Lawrence. Then, amid layers of geek-speak that I will not even pretend to understand, it seems that the whole near-Armageddon situation was brought about by bad people who, for inexplicable reasons, found open DNS resolvers on 138 modems and did dark internet stuff to bring a nation to its knees - and frame J-Law in the process. 138 dodgy/vulnerable modems? Is that seriously all it takes to extinguish a Spark?
By Monday the hackers had got bored and something about a UDP port had been blocked so the Dark Weekend of the inter-not was over and the teenagers went back to their caves and that was the end of the matter. Or not.