So last week, we had a holiday; the original staycation. On the Saturday we cleaned the house, got the shopping in and cleaned out the animals ready to leave our normal lives and go on holiday, from home, going to visit all those places near to home that you always mean to visit but never get round to. As part of this we were going to turn off the wifi, put the television in a cupboard and just enjoy the house as if it was a proper holiday cottage with none of those things.
To do without television, it turns out, was an easy thing to do. We watched Doctor Who last week, and then that was it, we didn’t watch it again. The internet was altogether a bit different. It didn’t help that I discovered a slight fault with three of my websites that needed resolving, and whilst it was a job for the webhosts and not me, I did have to keep in the loop to ensure it was all fixed.
But it was nice – so, so nice to live at home and have it as the default positon that one would curl up in the armchair with the book instead of reaching for the laptop or the TV remote. We should do this more. One of the reasons that I found the internet hard was that I have grown to like, and feel comfortable with, updating my twitter/facebook/journal with brief (and possibly interesting/intriguing and/or fun) tidbits of what was happening. I could do this by text of course, and did, and the one updated the other, and it did mean that whilst I did visit such pariahs of time-wasting like facebook on my phone, my experience was limited to a random selection of 6 news items at a time and unless people made particular reference to me or my posts, I was refreshingly ‘out of it’.
I must do this again sometime.
