Stand still a second. Can you hear that faint whooshing noise in the distance? That’s your entire life jumping online, that is.

A child born today will more than likely have their entire existence uploaded: those cute thumb-sucking baby photos dumped on Flickr, the first steps on YouTube, school days on Facebook, teacher reports and grades on the new education database, university and job applications filled in online, death certificate filed on a website.

And it’s not slowing down. We already shop and pay bills online, but with the arrival of digital distribution platforms such as Steam and iPlayer we’re now at the point where almost any content can be delivered to your desktop. Those who view real life as a chore can move to Second Life, get married, have sex, make money and get divorced- indulging all of those big, juicy vices virtually.

Google is going mad trying to digitise everything it can find, spurred on by the misguided belief that Tron is actually a design document. We write documents online, and back them up online. If Google had its way we’d all be born online. Much neater.

Microsoft has spent the last year banging on about The Cloud, which, if you believe the hype, is the Holy Grail, Ark of the Covenant and Dark Matter all rolled into one. The Cloud, it seems, is a party in the sky, and we’re all invited – although, at the moment, nobody’s entirely sure what it is.

This doesn’t matter, it’s a brave new world, and one I have absolutely no hope of entering. You see while Microsoft and the Beeb rush around breathlessly shouting about the future, many of us are still wheezing along on 2Mb/sec connections that are barely able to deliver our own email. My average web session is the online equivalent of driving a car in second gear repeatedly at a brick wall. The iPlayer delivers the chinese takeaway of television programming, serving up a small chunk of goodness every two minutes or so while it buffers. I could download a game off Steam, but I’d have to buy a really long book to kill the two months it woudl take to finish.

It’s so annoying it makes my teeth itch, but there’s simply no better option for the place where I live.  And I’m not alone. Survey after survey reveals that broadband in Britain is in a woeful state, and as it stands there seems little relief on the horizon. So, here I stand, a broadband exile, listening to the whoosh and watching the party, knowing I’m not getting in for a very long time.