I went on a digital detox by mistake

I suppose the signal tapped out around the time we thundered gently over the cattle grid and into the realm of the wild ponies. I wouldn’t see meaningful 4G again for four days, when I thundered gently back over it, and looked at the lay-by where I’d pulled over to feed the screaming baby, sweaty after hours in a hire car that somehow didn’t have working air-con. I genuinely felt like a different person.

We’d not known we were going somewhere where there was no WiFi and no phone signal. To paraphrase Withnail & I, we’d gone on a digital detox by mistake. A small takeover of one corner of the New Forest with my parents and siblings and their offspring. There was a vague sense of panic upon arriving — how to find my siblings and parents and their offspring with no means of getting in touch? — but after deploying the shockingly old fashioned solution of Asking A Person, we just knocked on each other’s little Wes Anderson cabins and treated the fanciest one like our own. From there the long weekend unfolded: we found a short woodland walk that we cut even shorter because there were trees to climb. We sent the children on a mission to find wood for a fire. We swam in rivers and snoozed under trees. We day-drank in the hot tub. Everyone stopped looking at their phones.

It was an education, and quite a stark one. I used to switch my phone off when I embarked on a holiday and would end up reading approximately three times as many books. It’s been tougher to do this in recent years but thinking about it I’m not actually sure why, and I think I will again. For the final day or so my husband’s phone stopped charging and he just let it die. Then he removed his social media access.

But this switch-off wasn’t considered or intentional: we just couldn’t get online. In the process, I was shown what a smartphone is actually useful for — and what we gain when we don’t use one all the time. Here’s what I learned:

Granted, I’ve become fairly slow at replying to most people since the second child turned up, but I would still say WhatsApp is my main reason for using a phone on the daily. We’d gain enough flickers of signal for a flurry of messages to filter in, then not have enough to respond. People I replied to were mostly limited to those with a live, important and changing scenario, such as having children in hospital. Everybody else, including work things, could wait. Nothing bad happened.

Sort of tragic to admit to this one because I know it’ll take a lot of work for me to get back into the no-phone habit (I could lie, but there’s no point). I felt more at ease, less anxious, more focussed and more emotionally regulated while physically unable to use my phone than I have in years.