It is a balmy summer evening in a suburb of Cambridge, England. Young gentlemen play cricket on the village green. Young ladies walk the country paths, shielded from the sun’s rays with fashionable parasols. An iced cream vendor perambulates the streets with a cheery smile. And a young couple sit before their computers, beating the living daylights out of some wayward troll cultists in the World of Warcraft.

All perfectly idyllic. A typical British summer evening. But, unpointful as it may seem to draw down such a melancholic and improbable path, what could spoil such a serene setting? Martians landing on the green, disrupting the cricket until destroyed by bacteria from inappropriately stored iced cream? An influx of crazed barely humanoid loons wearing brightly striped clothing, screeching barely polysyllabic mantras relating to the relative merits of two loosely geopolitically based groups forming the basis of some sort of banale, fruitless orchestrated confrontation of skill?

No, but worse. On the two brightly lit internet-facing screens, heroes and villians froze mid swing as the ADSL router coughed, spluttered and gave up.

It had done this before. It was a device of evil disposition, or rather it had been crafted by experts who themselves were sufficiently machiavellian as to contrive and shape designs into raw plastic with such painstaking malice that their work itself took on the dark aspect of its creators. Its very nature was transformed by the housing which contained it: transformed from a device whose purpose was to transmit the odd datum or two from one locale to another into a device eptly and precisely contrived to stop working whenever its operating temperature reached the meagre heights of a typical British summer.

Fortunately, even the most rigerous of master criminals always make one fatal mistake. In this case, the anglo saxon masons of telecommunications (whose company shall remain relatively nameless) who assembled the dread device erred in permitting it to be opened by a skilled God-fearing ecclesiast with the aid of a small, consecrated screwdriver. Naturally the device would hiss and writhe beneath his grasp, but their faith would be a worthy shield against the demoniac, and against the tiny, maliciously sticky footpads which had to be removed to gain access to the aforementioned screws. Once open, the vile humours which the device’s crafters had masterfully sought to enclose were freed, and set to disperse in the great outdoors, lost and winnowing amongst the cricketers and cucumber sandwiches.

And so would remain only the task of preventing the same from happening again. Fortunately, mundane but effective means were at hand. With the aid of the perforated aluminium bin which normally housed the hamster-bedding output from a paper shredder, a more ventilated housing for the router was fashioned. Next, from the bowels of one of the sturdy Warcraft-ready difference engines, a surplus fan was retrieved, without disconnecting it from the umbilical cord which allowed its mother board to sustain it. This, placed atop the perforated bin with its blowing-inclined side downwards, proved exquisitely capable of maintaining the surface temperature of the Dread Device at something more akin to a drab, English wintery morning.

And so the trollectomy was permitted to continue. Fortunately, the cricket, the iced cream, and more distantly the mantra-chanting, stripe-apparelled supporters of geopolitics were never disrupted. And, even more fortunately, the chances of anything coming from Mars were a million to one.