Every so often, I go on a holiday.
A few days, often a week, usually with my family.
We stay at quaint seaside holiday cottages and second-least-expensive hotels. Nice places. The weather usually shines on us.
We rarely travel abroad. The one major difference that I’ve noticed between British hotels and foreign hotels is that British hotels will always, no matter where you stay, provide one with a kettle, a couple of mugs and a small selection of teabags and instant coffees at no extra charge.
Douglas Adams must’ve known just how hard it was to get a good cuppa abroad when he wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which generic Englishman Arthur Dent travels to the end of the universe (which, apparently, has a five-star restaurant) but cannot, for the life of him, find a decent cup of tea anywhere other than his home planet (which is destroyed within the first few minutes of episode one). But I digress.
Anyway, because Wi-Fi still isn’t as commonplace as indoor plumbing, going on holiday leaves me without Internet access for a while.
For someone who uses the Internet on an almost constant basis, there is inevitably a period of acclimatisation. For the first day or two, my mind’ll still probably be focus’d on whichever “hilarious” YouTube video I’ve decided to like lately.1
When I discovered Twitter, I thought that it was a brilliant way to circumnavigate the exuberant charges charged by the mobile telecoms by sending one text message and having it pop-up on several people’s phones at once. Then Twitter switched off text notifications for UK users. Fine, I thought. I never talk to people anyway. I’ll just use it as a blog that I can update with my phone. Then Twitter moved their UK number to Ireland, meaning that not only were status update texts not covered by Orange’s bonus top-up promotion, they were twice as expensive. Naughty. This summer, I found myself with a new problem: No signal. I had completely lost the ability to tweet.
To say that I was isolated from the technological world would be a lie; an exaggeration at best. With the gradual phasing-out of analogue television, Freeview is now the norm — the bare minimum, really — and just about every household is now at that stage, even the quaint seaside holiday cottages; where there was once a charming CRT tuned to Tyne Tees in the corner, there now sits the cheapest flat-screen on the planet, connected to an error-prone digibox and a DVD player that I haven’t dared to touch. Also, I now have my iPod touch, which, while not entertaining the mobile Internet capabilities of its far more prolific, far more expensive iPhone bretherin (which I wouldn’t've been able to use anyway due to the lack of signal), plays music and video just fine (in anticipation, I loaded a bunch of Pani Poni Dash theme songs and a couple of YouTube videos on there before I left2) and, with the latest barely-worth-the-asking-price updates, lets me write blog posts on a sofa by the fire3 in a cottage on the coast of Northumberland. And, as is to be expected in this day and age, I will eventually be offered Internet access in some form, whether it’s a terminal in the hotel lobby with flies buzzing around it, a creaky AOL dial-up account on a dear old relative’s laptop computer with Accessability settings enabled and stern instructions to not “break” it or a pay-by-the-half-hour service at the local book depository.4
But this summer, I didn’t.
Earlier this year, when I went to Italy, I used the hotel’s lone Internet access point once. And that one usage just served to aggrivate me. You see, humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. So, when taken away from the Internet and given oh, say, three days to adjust, one becomes used to this arrangement.
And one feels at peace.
One has been freed from the burdens of checking one’s email, flipping through one’s unread items in Google Reader, being annoyed by the people on Twitter one still unaccountably follows, worrying over how many hits one’s blog gets, searching for the latest deals from RightStuf and so on. All those YouTube videos and games of Minesweeper were tearing whatever was left of my attention span to shreds. Just a few quiet days of reading, walks on the beach and eating Auchtermuchty-type sandwiches5 and I’m a new man.
And one makes a vow.
That when one goes back home, things’ll be different.
No longer will one be a slave to technology. Feeds will be unsubscribed from. Friends will be unfollowed. Games will be uninstalled. And, remarkably, computers will be shut down once in a while.
Because, as it turns out, the Internet just makes one’s life worse.
And then you get home and Google Reader tells you that you have 1000+ Unread Items and you start to blast through them and the seasons rotate and history repeats itself and life goes on. ㋼
- You can check my latest favourites in the sidebar over there. But you knew that already. [↩]
- Some transformation sequences and two versions of Keyboard Cat. [↩]
- It was a particularly wet day. [↩]
- Incidentally, I can highly recommend Barter Books in Alnwick if you ever find yourself in Northern England. Tea, biscuits, Internet access and over a quarter of a million second-hand books. I got a nearly-new copy of The Salmon of Doubt for £2.20 (which’ll be why I spent an earlier paragraph discussing THGTTG), and it even came with a free bookmark. [↩]
- Haggis and bacon. A new candidate for Best Thing I’ve Ever Eaten. [↩]
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