Barbados revisited

Exactly ten years ago, I wrote this column from a family holiday in a cottage on the English coast with no phone, no internet, no television and negligible mobilephone reception.

The grown-ups suffered the withdrawal symptoms, marching around looking for a signal, fretting about their email. The teenagers just got on with mucking about in boats, doing jigsaws and laughing. I reflected that life without electronic connections had its attractions.

We have taken that cottage for the same week every year for 27 years and we’ve just repeated the experience. Many of the same people who were with us ten years ago joined us, and some now have children of their own, all under five years old. This latest generation has no notion of what life is like without the internet. They think that having long video chats with Grandma is how it’s always been..

The cottage is on the periphery of the electronic world, and the mobile-phone signal is still dreadful. Incidentally, that may change soon: the chairman of a major mobile-phone network has bought a house there, and I can’t help speculating that the signal strength may soon miraculously improve.

However, before we arrived one of the charming owners of our cottage called to warn me that wi-fi had been installed, and said she hoped I didn’t mind. She sounded a little embarrassed, I thought, and told me I was welcome to unplug the router and hide it if I wanted to. She said one of the previous tenants had done just that – not because her children were using it, but in order to force her husband to engage with the family.

I muttered grumpily about ‘Change and decay in all around I see’. I talked of the ravens leaving the Tower. But, in the end, I decided the time had come to admit that nowadays we know better how to manage such matters and I risked leaving the wi-fi on, with all the concomitant cultural perils.

To my relief, it all worked out rather well. It was good, for example, to be able to read our newspapers on tablets at breakfast, without having to drive a few miles to pick up a copy. My son-in-law, a solicitor, was grateful to be able to check work emails unobtrusively from time to time, without making an expedition to do so. It was reassuring to know that we had Netflix or iplayer (via tablets) in reserve in case of urgent child-related need.

In the event, we were lucky with the weather, and all five of the children were perfectly happy playing with each other or the grown-ups and certainly happier than if they’d been stuck in front of any screen.

The lesson we learned is rather encouraging. We are acquiring the ability to moderate our dependence on phones, laptops, tablets and the rest. The trick is to use the internet properly, for our benefit, and not to allow it to suck us into the morass of addictive games, endless scrolling and mindless nonsense.

As my daughter, the mother of three of the under-fives, wisely pointed out, the internet is like a machete: you can use it to cut a safe path through the jungle, or as a weapon when you’re leading a national uprising. Either way, it’s not the machete’s fault. So it is with the internet: a force for good, if managed and used properly.

It’s up to us all to make sure the young know how that’s done.