JUST SAYING

When we are able to travel more freely again, Laura Fowler will be ditching the selfie and making more of experiences themselves

The day before restaurants were ordered to close again, I was in Piccadilly breakfasting at the Wolseley with a colleague. I say that as though I do it all the time, but I don’t and so I was very excited but trying not to show it.

Waiters were gliding around the black-and-white marble floor like ice skaters, bringing champagne to this table and that even though it was only 10am, the whole splendid scene presided over by a gigantic Christmas tree. Beneath the tree, a woman paused for a selfie. She did at least have the grace to look embarrassed. This kind of thing is frowned upon at the Wolseley (though not outwardly of course; no one ever frowns at the Wolseley).

My colleague Matthew and I talked about this desire to photograph ourselves everywhere; about how Angkor Wat and Santorini’s caldera and the Trevi Fountain are obscured by forests of smartphones, seminal travel moments experienced only through a lens. Holidays become distilled into a series of snapshots, an edited version of real life, everything outside the frame forgotten.

In BBC Four’s Age of the Image, said Matthew, Dr James Fox observed how tourists, after queuing hours at the Louvre for their spatially distanced 30 seconds before the Mona Lisa, invariably take pictures or turn their backs for a selfie, rather than taking the opportunity to look properly at Leonardo’s enigmatic masterpiece in the flesh.

And for what, when you can buy a far better-quality postcard in the gift shop? Likes? Proof we were there?

Even as I sat airily rebuking my fellow breakfasters, I glanced up at that tree and secretly wished for a selfie.

The desire to capture beautiful moments is natural, of course; we have been doing it forever. But when the process of capturing it overshadows the moment

If our motive is social media approval, perhaps it’s time to reconsider

itself, or our motive is social media approval, perhaps it’s time to reconsider what really matters.

So for 2021 I’m making a resolution: to start living in the moment. To see the world unfiltered and truly lose myself in those experiences that enrich a life, even if there is no one else to see them.