ESCAPE TO YNYS MÔN

So anyway, I recently spent a week away – as best I could - from all types of personal technology which, as we all know, these days is almost entirely the same as being dead in this great big modern world of ours, except of course that it isn’t.

In fact, being away from all those bleeps and buzzes and rings and little irritations that come along with those things made me feel rather more alive than I actually had in a long time. The only moment when not having access to eine electronischedevisen, öder ein “Gizmo” (as I suddenly feel the need to refer to such things for no very good reason) became a slight problem was when we arrived at a much vaunted restaurant at just after 1.30 in the afternoon only to discover that they served lunches until from 12.00 to 1.30, which, considering the three mile drive through a maze of side roads, I like to think that they could have mentioned on the sign pointing off the main road.

Obviously, looking up their website would have prevented that little irritation from occurring, but equally, it was hardly the most tragic occurrence, and we did find somewhere else to eat. Equally, being “on holiday” should mean that you have a more “que sera sera” approach to your days as you drift around in unfamiliar territory.

And my! Aren’t I getting all multi-lingual today? It’s all this travelling, you see…? It broadens even the narrowest of minds…

Granted there might be those who suggest that being on Ynys Môn for a week is almost exactly the same as being dead anyway, but I would say “Yah, boo, sucks!” to that sort of suggestion, even if it was coming from me, in a manner designed to prove that I’ve not quite yet managed to have my mind completely broadened.

I did, of course, find that I had accidentally actually taken an electronic device with me, because I realised that my “work phone” was still in my jacket pocket when we arrived, but when I was caught idly (or perhaps craftily and surreptitiously) trying to switch it on during a quiet moment as I was listening to the test match on Sunday evening, my “media disease” was swiftly frowned upon and it didn’t happen again, perhaps not least because the battery life in these things is appalling and I hadn’t forgotten not to take the charging lead along with me.

Actually, though, it was a blessed relief to be free of the things for a few days. I rather hope that you can’t imagine how invasive those things can be when all you want to do is get away from them. I know that if I had switched the wretched thing on at all at any time for the rest of the duration, one of those little red lights would have been flashing away telling me that there was a “notification” of some message or other that was probably being quite successfully dealt with in my absence.

Me being me, however, I would have fretted and flapped and focussed about it and would simply have HAD to go and read it, which would have left me stroppy and anxious and, in the end, would have completely defeated the purpose of being on holiday at all, which was, of course, a rather desperate need to get away from it all, stop thinking about it all the time and to do something else for a change whilst spending some quality time with my beloved and not have to share around pieces of myself with the rest of the world and all that it demands of me.

In fact I still struggle to come to terms with the amount of people I see sitting on beaches staring at their little boxes, still desperate to stay in touch with their home life. As a child, one of the utter joys of my holidays was the chance to get away from the everyday and those dreary mundanities of real life and the same old faces, but I suppose that the world has changed, even in those faraway places, and people want to be able to keep in touch with those very same people that I would cross continents to get away from for a while.

And, of course, despite all of my fears, being away from my little web-based world didn’t stop it from turning. The world managed to tick along quite happily without me for a week and, upon my return it became swiftly apparent that hardly anyone had even noticed that I’d been away.

This should, of course, have given me the final push to properly decide to stay away permanently, but a long afternoon of trying to upload my holiday snaps to some website or other soon pulled me back in to the twisted web of website checking, albeit with a slightly refreshed point of view.

After all, when the only person who seems aware of your absence is a Twitter acquaintance from half a world away, and your blog counter shows that you’re read almost as much when you write nothing as when you write something, and your little red flags on your social networking site number precisely one, and your personal email account contains – after you’ve sifted through all of the detritus – also just one personal message, it does tend to make you think about how important you are to it and, consequently, how much importance you tend to give it that it really doesn’t deserve. But then getting away from it all can do that to you and give you a fresh perspective on just about everything, really…

Anyway, my week on Ynys Môn was very pleasant, thank you for asking, and whilst it didn’t quite let me escape from my media disease entirely, and I didn’t quite manage to fully escape the horrors of the run-up to the Festival of Five Hoops and was therefore fully aware of the terrifying morning-time televisual resurrection of Sian Williams after I’d thought that we were finally rid of her, I was even relaxed enough to deal with that, too.

I’m sure I’ll be talking about all of these things in greater depth sometime soon, so, as ever, stay tuned…