#24 My week of rest and relaxation

Or, dispatches from a hopeless phone addict

I took a week off work.

Where did you go, you might be wondering? What did you do?

Well, nowhere and nothing. And it was perfect.

I’m bad at taking time off that is actually restful, prone to booking myself onto a week long social experiment masquerading as a “yoga retreat” or an impulsive European city “break” which isn’t actually a break at all, when I realise too late that all I want to do is lie down in my room like Colin in The Secret Garden.

But this time, reader, that’s exactly what I did.

Did I read a book? No, not a page. I’m still stuck at the same moment halfway through Demon Copperhead, I haven’t read any more of my Hilary Mantel French Revolution yarn, I didn’t go to the library to pick up All Fours like I promised myself I would and I didn’t even open Love in Exile. In other words, it’s been a clean sweep for no reading.

Nor did I do any writing, despite some flashes of inspiration for a novel (hello, secret dream!!). I’m choosing to brood and ruminate rather than actually put pen to paper, because I have a distraction: my phone.

Oh dear, my phone, my phone. I am hopelessly addicted to my phone.

This came to a head last week when I had to somehow avoid spoilers for The White Lotus finale for two days until my friend came back to London so we could watch it together.

For someone whose Pavlovian response is opening Instagram, I knew this would be difficult.

“Guys, I don’t know if it’s possible to avoid spoilers til Tuesday…” I wrote in the group chat. A chorus of ‘get a grips’ boomeranged back to my phone.

“Just don’t go on Instagram,” said my most sensible friend. Duh.

I managed to mostly follow their advice. I avoided Instagram, apart from very short little scrolls where I swiped off as soon as I entered dangerous spoiler-laden territory. Not so easy given my algorithm had picked up the fact I was watching The White Lotus, so all I was seeing were memes of the show and awkward backstage interviews with the cast from the Hollywood Reporter:

Patrick Schwarzenegger, teeth gleaming, reading from a card: What’s Jason’s most likely swear on set?

Jason Isaacs: That’s easy [writes down something on card with squeaky Sharpie]

PS: OK, I’ve got it [holds up card] “Bloody hell.”

JI: [scoffs] No, “fuck that.”

PS: [laughs nervously]

Me: [shuts app, groans, rolls over, knowing another 90 seconds of my life has been wasted]

Why do I do it to myself? Spend so much time on Instagram, I mean. There’s nothing I want to see on there, truly. And yet I find myself tethered, pulled by an invisible thread, to the Meta sinkhole.

The thought of deleting Instagram has crossed my mind. But if I did so… what would I do? Wouldn’t I miss the constant traffic of… stuff?

Well, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think I’d miss anything. It would probably free up the space in my mind to actually exercise the intellectual part of my brain which has been withering for about a decade.

But the thing is, we are simple creatures. I am a simple creature. When given the choice to read words on a monochrome page or look at colours on my phone, I would rather look at colours on my phone. I’ve tried to self-impose limits on my screen time but I know myself: given the option to close the app now or remind myself in fifteen minutes, I will be reminded in fifteen minutes.

It’s not just my online-ness disturbs me, it’s also my attachment to the physical object of my phone. I walk around with it at all times, my hand cupped around it like a horrible soon-to-be-arthritic claw, knowing that if I were ever to actually disconnect from it, turn it off and stick it in a drawer, I wouldn’t be able to do my job, or date, and that my sudden absence would deeply worry everyone in my life. Talk about a Catch-22.

I know people who have gone radically offline and got a dumbphone. Well, good for them, but I don’t think I could do that. For a start, I need Maps. As I relaxed more into my week off, I started to make all kinds of errors, the dreamy part of my nature (ahem, chaotic) coming more and more to the fore. As the days wore on I went from missing buses to getting on the wrong one entirely.

One sunny afternoon, without a thought in my brain I hopped on the 185 when I’d been meaning to take the 484 and ended up going, not in the wrong direction, but in the right direction very, very slowly… for an hour. And because my week off had relaxed me to the point of insanity, I had a dead phone and no charger. Oops. Luckily, as I said, I had nothing to do, and nowhere to be.

The one thing I did have with me was my friend Ada Barumé’s romance novel which I’d attended the launch for the previous evening - and on this bus winding through Forest Hill, Catford, and finally Lewisham, up hill and down dale, with my phone dead as a dodo, I read 150 pages.

I’m calling it a digital detox.