The sound of silence

This month, I’m writing this column whilst on holiday sans electricity. The owner of the property we’re renting cheerfully warned me that the power would be out for a few hours one day during our stay for maintenance work. We brushed it off, assuming we’d be out at the beach anyway. Unfortunately, we didn’t take into account the British weather and today coincided with the type of rain and wind that made the dog look at me as though I was insane when I tried to take her out this morning. So we’re sat in our temporary home watching it lash down.

Of course, everyone ignored my warnings to charge up devices overnight, so they sit silent drained of power. Even if they are useable, there’s no internet and phone signals are so weak as to be useless. I charged my laptop and phone up, but I’m pretending they too are out of commission for the time being—I’m drafting this up with paper and pencil. (Note to self: when did my handwriting become so atrocious?)

I have to say, this enforced information diet is enjoyable. The kids are reading (gasp) physical books rather than watching YouTube. There have been actual conversations between family members.

A few weeks ago, rushing to catch a train, I thought I’d left my phone at home. I momentarily experienced the kind of panic that should be reserved for lost children: How would I pay for parking? What about picking up reserved tickets. Subsequently, I found the phone in the car footwell and I chided myself for the panic and reliance on a single point of failure that I’d never accept in any infrastructure I was managing.

This holiday outage then is the perfect cold turkey for my state of constant connectedness. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go around switching off things at the wall so that even if the power does come back on I can enjoy being offline for a little bit longer. jolyon.brown@gmail.com.