People have suffered greater deprivations. I will not be going without food or exercise or hope. I will not be risking my health. And I don't expect the world to be a better place as a consequence of what I'm doing. As acts of self-denial go this is a small one. But it's big for me. One week without recourse to a home or mobile phone, no fax machine, no internet, no emails coming in or going out. Seven days of telecommunication darkness - off line, off air, off life. Can I manage that?
It's a sabbatical I'm after. A disruption of the patterns of subservience to my machines - the starting every time I hear a phone, the waking in the night, wondering whether I've logged off or forgotten to recharge something, the leaping to my feet, no matter where I am or what I'm doing, whenever one of them importunes me. I the servant, they the master. They were meant to make life easier for ME; now I want free of the tyrannical little bastards.
There's an argument for my not opening letters either. You're incommunicado or you're not. But this is an investigation into myself as electronically dependent modern man, and there's nothing particularly modern about letters or the way I open them.
The dependency I'm testing began, though, with conventional mail. How long I've been a letter junky I can't remember, but I guess it dates from the time I was waiting to hear whether I'd passed the 11 plus. So what's changed? Decades later I'm still waiting for the adult equivalent. Word that I've won the Nobel Prize. Or that Disney wants to film my latest novel. And with this continuing quiver of expectancy goes a near hysterical fear that the letter I'm hanging on for has gone astray, been eaten by a dog, been eaten by the postman, or has fallen down that crack in the concrete just outside my front door.
In the 21st century it is easy for this neurosis, if that isn't too mild a word, to connect with the gadgetry of electronic communication as well. Messages get wiped off. Emails vanish into cyberspace. Faxes fade before they get to you. So I am not without anxiety. I could lose everything this week. But maybe in some corner of myself that's also what I want. To sever the silken reins of ignominious expectation for ever. I begin on the easiest day, a Saturday. What follows is the diary of my struggle.
Saturday
Out early so as not to be tempted to switch anything on. No papers delivered Saturday, so I normally get news from the internet, surfing irresponsibly when bored, stumbling on a book or a cheap airline deal, idling through life's little bargains and surprises. But not today. Off-line, I feel a more serious person. Queerly deprived. Intellectually abstemious.
I leave without my mobile phone, then go back for it. I'll panic if I suddenly reach for it, forgetfully, and discover it's not there. And what if there's an emergency that overrides this exercise? Someone falling down in a dead faint in Harrods' food hall and me not having my mobile to call for help. Me falling down in a dead faint in Harrods' food hall and not being able to ring BUPA. It's enough, surely, that I have it switched off.
I arrange to meet my partner for lunch in Harvey Nichols, agreeing that if I'm running late I'll call.
"Oh, I can't," I remember.
"Then I'll call you," she says.
I nod. Then, "Oh, you can't," I remember.
We agree we will get there separately, somehow, without further communication - an idea which all but overcomes us with its novelty.
Over a distracted lunch - for I keep looking longingly at other people's mobiles, and jumping whenever one rings - we discuss how we're going to manage this. Since no man with a heart can go dark entirely, lest someone out there needs him, we accept that I must check my messages before bed. Anything crucial she will answer in the morning. Better still, she will check my messages for me. I feel vaguely squeamish about this, but agree. My phones are hers. Behold the advantage of having nothing to hide.
Sunday
We have six different ringing tones in our apartment, not counting alarm clock, egg timer, smoke detector, doorbell and whatever it is that goes off - I haven't found it yet - when its batteries are low. We have a house phone each, a mobile phone each, and a fax each. All mine are switched off, all hers are going. But it would be no different if all mine were on. I am not a person anybody wants to ring on Sunday. There was a time when the novelist Paul Bailey would buzz me after church so that we could pass on to each other the bad news of other novelists' success. But we have long since covered everybody we know and it's no fun with novelists you don't.
My partner, on the other hand, is very much a Sunday talking-to person. Not only are her phones and faxes hot, I can hear emails hissing on to her computer screen. This is because she has treated her friendships respectfully over the years, tending them like sweet peas. And so the flowers in her garden ring, and mine do not.
"Any messages I can check for you?" she asks me, before bed. I don't answer. I make a sign showing I've been turned off. This morbid turn was not something I had expected so soon. Already I am feeling existentially alone. Roll on Monday, when business life resumes.
Monday
Disgruntlement. Badly want to invigorate my week with an email check. Get input from the turning world beyond. Be mesmerised by the yellow mercury filling the empty rectangle marked "PROGRESS" - coming, coming, coming... waiting for the missives to be sucked one by one from the ether, before they pop orgasmically into my box. But no such invigoration this morning. I have woken anxiously, remembering that there is business relating to the letting of a house I must attend to. How could I have forgotten that? If I turn the phone on and it rings, it will certainly be the agents. I won't answer the phone, but I will have the message checked and if it is them I will have to ring them back. Which is forbidden. My partner suggests I borrow her phone, but we agree that would be sophistical.
Then she has a brainwave. What about going down into the street and using a phone box! I am flabbergasted. "Do phone boxes still exist?" She thinks they do. I wouldn't know. I haven't used a phone box since when? The blitz? But that's what I do, anyway. I go down into the street, ask a passer-by if he has seen a phone box, follow his instructions, look for the door, then go in. A curious, Proustian nostalgia assails me. I can suddenly smell all the phone calls I have ever made from a public phone.
The box is plastered with the business cards of whores and transsexuals, most of them pre-op, whatever that means, but otherwise quite clean. Nothing vandalised. No puddles of urine on the floor. No needles. No wires pulled out. And when you put coins in the slot it accepts them. Is there a connection here? Did people trash phone boxes in the past only because they couldn't get the phone to work? That would certainly accord with progressive thinking on the subject: that it is frustration that makes us resort to violence, not the inherent brutality of our natures. But another thought occurs to me - what if phone boxes are no longer vandalised only because we don't need them any more, as a consequence of our each carrying around a little phone box of our own. That too has progressive implications. Give us all a share of the world and we'll treat it better. Wire us up to one another and universal love is just a connection fee away.
The estate agent I need to talk to is out. The receptionist suggests she ring me back on her return, whereupon I go into an interminable spiel explaining why she can't. "I'm honour bound not to take a call," I tell her, "at least not on my own phone. What I'm trying to decide is whether I'd be breaking my word to myself if I waited here and got you to ring me back on this number."
"Where's here?" she asks, without interest.
"A phone box."
There is a silence. She thinks I'm a pervert. A man who rings up estate agents from phone boxes. "It might be a long wait," she says. "What about email?"
By the end of my first working day I am swearing more than usual. I have a fucking life to live. I have matters of moment to attend to. Not just with my estate agents but with my publisher. I have a novel coming out soon and there are things to discuss. I can't afford this idiocy. Not now. It's the wrong time. I should have started last week. I should have started next week. More of this tomorrow and I'll quit. Bollocks to it.
Tuesday
A calmer morning than anticipated. An odd philosophical indifference to everything outside the beating of my own heart has descended on me. Who cares about estate agents? Who cares about my novel? I am in that sort of a mood when a man walks out of his marriage and his job and goes wandering round the tropics in a linen suit. Did Gauguin begin by throwing his phone away?
All day this exquisite equilibrium stays with me. I even decide to switch my house and mobile phones on so that I can listen to them ringing while I'm writing and not give a damn. It irks me that both remain as silent as the grave until about 4pm. Could society have given up on me as blithely as I have given up on it?
Finally the mobile comes alive, squirms around on my desk like a sardine in a net, stops, then starts ringing again at 10-minute intervals. Whoever rang has left a message. That's unless the first ring was the message. I haven't touched my mobile since Saturday, which means there could be messages on it four days' old. I break into a sweat. I have forgotten that messages are wiped from my mobile every forty-eight hours. Disney could have rung on Sunday and I will never know. Not having heard a word from me on Saturday, they could be offering Paul Bailey the Nobel Prize this minute.
Where the hell is my partner? Never there when I need her. I start to ring her then remember I can't. What's the greater dereliction, ringing her or taking my own messages? I decide to ring her but she's engaged. I leave her a message: "Ring me, it's urgent." Three minutes later she rings, but of course I can't take her call.
I helped run a restaurant once and watched inexperienced staff cracking up. The tell-tale sign is not knowing what to do with your hands. Now you're frothing up a cappuccino, now you're looking for a pen to write out a bill, now you're groping for cutlery. That's how I am with my phones. At a loss what to do next I switch on my fax machine. But nothing comes through.
Wednesday
I stay in bed and watch one-day cricket from the subcontinent. Afterwards it occurs to me to wonder whether television isn't just a telephone with pictures, in which case I've blown it for a second day.
Thursday
Deeply ashamed of my performance so far. Am reluctant, though, to consider the experiment a fiasco and call it off. We don't stop living just because we sometimes live badly. God loves a back-slider, we are told, so he can put out a hand and haul him in again. Viewed theologically, my failures are witness to my success.
But no man is an electronic island. There are others implicated in all this. I have been making a South Bank Show on the novel. I thought my role in the film was finished, but there are one or two things my director still needs to ask me. As it happens my director is also my partner, which ought to make communication easier. The trouble is, I am not communicable with.
"Couldn't you send a bike round with the questions?" I ask her.
"And the answers?"
"Get it to wait."
"What if I need a conversation?"
"Talk to the biker."
"A conversation with you, you fool."
Our relationship, you see, is becoming abusive.
Later that day I go out and buy her flowers and while I'm in the florists I wonder whether it would be a kindness to buy my mother flowers too, and the estate agent, and my literary agent, and then all the women I have ever known. Being incommunicado is making me maudlin. Does that mean we all had softer hearts when people were beyond our electronic reach? When all we could do was think about them and miss them? Alone in a silent world, I summon up remembrance of things past. It is like a premonition of the silence of death, when all phones will stop together. The grave's a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there interface.
Friday
Almost through. Not exactly with flying colours, but it could have been worse. I still have language. And my ears have not yet dropped off, Darwinianly, from underuse. As far as the internet goes I am a winner. Not been online once, not even to sneak a cheap airline ticket. But now, suddenly, there is a little piece of information I need, of the sort I would normally go to Google for. To do with loose skin. Not mine, that of a character in a new novel I have started. It could wait, but I am an impatient writer. I want it now. Again my partner bails me out.
"Try a library," she says.
A library! I remember those. I used to live in libraries. The thought of returning to one floods me with well-being. A library, where you see real people, receive answers to questions in a human voice, touch books - actual books - and stumble inadvertently on interesting material you weren't searching for. A library is to the internet what telly of yesterday is to telly now - a palace of serendipities, where no limits are set to your curiosity, no assumptions made about your ignorance, a true democracy of the intelligence.
Ah, a library! I spend half a day there, finding out about loose skin, leafing through newspapers, starting a Ford Maddox Ford novel I'd never heard of, reading the noticeboard, dozing in my seat, and listening to the soothing hum of humanity. It can deliver miracles, the internet, but it can't do this.
On the spot I make a resolution I won't keep. To remember that the best knowledge is the fruit of human interchange, and to go get it from the world, not from a computer screen.
Saturday
I keep going half a day more than I have to as a sort of recompense for my earlier fallings off. At noon I feel free to check my emails. I don't expect many. I am not one of those writers who gives his email address after every paragraph. I like the idea of engaging readers in argument, but that doesn't mean I want to hear their side of it. Surprising, then, to see the yellow mercury seep slowly into my PROGRESS BOX, promising more and longer messages than I normally get in a month. How exciting, that people have been thinking about me while I've been away. It's like being let out of jail and finding a crowd waiting.
But when I go through what I've got, 30 out of the 35 turn out to be from the same person, somebody I have never heard of sending me an enclosure of photographs of her leaving party. Same message, same enclosure, 30 times.
I do not try to understand how something like this can happen. I just feel an oaf. A prey again, so soon, to childish hope. Already I am missing those austere days of my inaccessibility, when no anticipation could disturb my peace of mind and I was sufficient unto myself. I was happy then.
