French connection on a digital-free holiday
Holidays are meant to be restorative of health and relationships. It depends where you go. A literary friend just returned from a short break at the Salzburg music festival, which she found awash with politicians, including the British prime minister.
I found a farmhouse to rent in France that was idyllically remote and offered high-speed broadband — the equation that promises greatest happiness.
We travelled by Eurostar and the young took longer, saving a few pounds with a dawn flight from Luton, because money is precious and time is cheap when you are in your 20s.
As the latecomers zoomed instinctively towards the Wi-Fi code on the router, I broke the news that the internet was down. And it was a weekend. And we were in France.
Many people talk about looking forward to a break from the internet, moving to a slower world of artisanal markets and books by the pool. Do they really? We over-40s remember those days, when we would try to locate the World Service on shortwave radio and fall on three-day-old copies of the Daily Express in the village
tabac. How much better it is to break fresh croissants after downloading five of the day’s newspapers by 7.30am.
My complaints to our rental company became as pompous as they were pointless. Did they not realise that the internet was now a utility, as important as hot water? A man arrived in a white van with a couple of screwdrivers and left again with a shrug. It was no good. Someone, somewhere, had cut the telephone line.
Our week of digital isolation revealed the extent to which work and leisure have become more or less inseparable — the employed go off with the expectation of keeping in touch all day. The entrepreneurial selfemployed boast of working from anywhere but can do so only with a decent connection. None of us is truly confident enough to go off the radar.
Meanwhile, at the farmhouse, something else happened. As if in a modern morality tale, we began to have real conversations about modern expectations of work; pressures from high-achieving peers; our envy of those who actually enjoy their work; the fun to be had from more liberated career choices.
The young men returned to a constant theme: with whom would you swap your life? The immediate attraction was for money. Elon Musk’s name came up early, naturally. Then someone opted for Richard Branson. I pointed out that they had just bypassed 40 years of their life. Another decided he would be happy to swap with Prince Philip.
These confessions came because we were forced to pay attention to each other. Our time is usually spent in half-listening or watching. We dip in and out between real conversation and the internet voices in our heads. We reach for Google to prove a point.
The real human gift, of course, is the tête-à-tête.