I tweeted from beside the pool in Lanzarote on Monday afternoon. It was the first time I had even looked at Twitter since turning off my iPhone the previous Tuesday. I had gone online at a little kiosk in our apartment block reception to check us in for our flight home. If I hadn't had to do it, I know I wouldn't have even looked at the web until I came back to Cork. My email was (and remains) in "out of office reply" mode until I go back to work next week.
For the week we were away, I didn't so much as look at a paper, and I refused point blank to hook up the (extremely cheap and very high quality) satellite TV service offered to us - RTE, BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky Sports and a couple of others. I just didn't want to know. I just wanted to get away from it all. I turned on my phone twice in the week to check for any urgent messages, and to maintain contact when I was off for a walk with Boy Wonder, but otherwise it sat in a drawer.
The Queen Bee texted her sister a few times a day - they are pretty much joined at the hip - but otherwise she also maintained "communications silence" for the week. That's how we do it on holiday. The Coogans officially go "offline", until the plane lands back in Cork.
But I wonder, if anyone else does it anymore?.
I spent, as you do, many hours last week, sitting in the sun, with a book and a bottle of beer. Surrounded by other families around the pool, however, I observed something I've never seen before. No sunlounger (other than mine) was without a smartphone, an iPad or tablet, or sometimes even an actual laptop! A family near me on Monday had four phones, two pads and a notebook on the go. In the evenings, as we had dinner and a few drinks, I was amused to find that free wifi was almost as important to some diners as the coldness of their beer or the quality of their food. Holiday laughter and chatter has been replaced by the 'bip bip' of hand held games. The last straw, however, and the trigger, I guess, for this blog, was when I saw a family watching "Eastenders" on an iPad, as they tucked into their Canarian Potatoes. I mean, come ON!
A holiday is supposed to be a break. It's supposed to be a week or two where we change our routine, forget about our troubles and just, well, LIVE. Spend time with the family. Do stuff you can't normally get the time or the opportunity to do. I can honestly tell you that if I hadn't been back in Cork, I might have taken a full day to hear about Robert Heffernans great win in Moscow. When Cork beat Dublin I was snorkelling in the warm sea with my daughter. I got a text about it hours later when I turned on my phone. I had actually forgotten it was Sunday - otherwise I might (I admit) have toddled over to the Mucky Duck for a pint to watch the second half. Or I might not. That, to me, is getting away from it all.
I hope the people around me last week had a great holiday. If their time away was even fractionally as much fun as ours, then I'm sure they'll have had a ball - but to me, a lot of them looked as if they were doing exactly what they do at home - except they were doing it in the sun.
The Queen Bee has a phrase for it. She calls it FOMO - Fear of Missing Out. Fear that if they go home after a week or a fortnight that they won't KNOW about something that happened while they were away. That they won't have SEEN that match or that TV moment that went viral, or, Heaven forbid, that some "celebrity" or other has filed for a divorce. In these days of instant, global mass communication, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and what have you,they feel they must "keep up".
As I was packing to come home, I saw a family arriving from Dublin at the apartment next to us. They left their cases on the terrace, and opened the slide door. As his wife and kids checked out the place that would be their home for the next week or two, however, Dad sat down, opened his backpack, fished out his iPad, and proceeded to log in to the free wifi. He sat there for a good ten minutes, tapping. It wasn't urgent work to be finished - no - he was on Twitter! What on Earth, I wondered, is that important?
What happened to just "Getting Away from It All"...
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