Tanya Gold unplugs her computer and hides her mobile phone. Can she survive? | Life and style | The Guardian
Last week, the Guardian asked me to turn my mobile telephone and my computer off for a week. It wasn't until I hung up that I realised that I had happily agreed to decapitate myself. How would I live? How would I work? I am a freelance journalist and I need a mobile. I have accepted commissions while sitting on toilets. I always take my mobile into the toilet.
I love my electronic communication. I know exactly which platforms on the underground have mobile phone reception - the westbound Circle line at Victoria, for instance - and I check my emails on my mobile every other breath. My phone is stuck to my ear like a cheap parasite. Most of all, I adore Wikipedia. I like to lie in bed watching The Ten Commandments and Wikipedia-ing the cast - just so I know what the man riding the donkey was doing in 1928.
So I prepare very carefully for my experiment. To deal with my email purdah, I draft a weird little automated response (plus fake kiss). I include my landline number and my home address - in case of letters - brushing aside security concerns. The only people who really want to hurt me are Barry Manilow fans because I criticised him in print; most of them can't move anyway.
I then copy my important telephone numbers into an address book. I haven't had an address book since I was seven. I don't have a clock either. Without my mobile, I will have no idea what time it is. So I dust off my Chairman Mao novelty alarm clock. It doesn't work, but neither did communism. It runs 30 minutes late. And I copy my appointments for the week out of my telephone and on to a piece of A4 paper. I can't read my handwriting. It looks like a spider with manic depression. "Call Peter" looks like "Kill Peter". My Q is simply a swastika. And I can't spell. I don't know the difference between morning and mourning. And so I wring everybody up to say goodbuy.
"Oh," says my sister. "It's like you're dying. But I can still write." "How will I get in touch with you?" asks my mother, doing her drinks-party parody of a Jewish mother, which I think she does because she thinks people are listening in to our conversation. I do actually feel like I am dying. I feel numb, and I can't add to that, because numb is numb. I feel like I am going away, stopping the clock, and stepping off. I go to the gym to visit my personal trainer and I tell her I have switched my mobile off for a whole week. It feels like news. This is my news! My news is - I have no news!
On my way back from the gym I feel a curious kind of calmness. Normally when you use a phone and you switch it on it is an event. It is Trial by Telephone. How many messages will I have? Has the editor of International Metal Tube magazine (it does exist) shouted, "Get Tanya Gold!" ("Get 007!"). Will it be Grazia? Hello!? Fabulous magazine? (It does exist - I sometimes get messages that say, "Hello, this is Claire from Fabulous magazine.") But I don't have that, because my mobile is now at home in a cupboard behind a packet of chickpeas. When the tube comes out of a tunnel I don't have to pick up my phone. When we get to Finchley Road the phones start beeping. People retrieve their messages. Then they start calling. "Hello," they typically say. "I'm in West Hampstead."
I rush home to pick up my messages. I have bought a new telephone. My old one was just so mean and beige and insignificant and dead. The new one is big and solid and banana-yellow. It spits dusts when it rings, and explodes, as if to say: "Someone is dead!" It has an answer machine but it isn't a proper answer machine. It is one of those awful "the person you are calling is unavailable" messages, given by a woman who sounds like she has been chewing pethidine for 15 years, and is only doing this to earn money to buy more.
It is incredibly exciting - I have three messages! It is just like the olden days when you would come home, pick up your messages and then have to do your evening telephoning like the first Mrs De Winter in Rebecca. ("Mrs De Winter used to make her telephone calls in the library, Madam.")
I don't miss email at all because I hate writing emails. Maybe it is because I get paid by the word, so every word written in email feels like money lost. (As Julie Burchill wrote, "Fuck you is two quid.") I hate receiving them too, because people are always just wanting things from you. What passes for interaction makes you feel no less lonely. To cover this up, I usually affect a jaunty style when writing emails, full of exclamation marks and fake kisses.
But I love my mobile and I remember every phone I've ever had. I remember the font and the feel of them, and the way they click shut. They are a body part. Even my baby nephew knows how to use a mobile phone. He may think that the person he is talking to has been turned into a mobile phone but he still knows how to operate one.
Later, I have to write an article, without using a computer. This is simply terrible. I haven't written longhand for so long I don't know how to write any more. The only sentence that comes to mind is, "Once upon a time a journalist lost her mobile phone." I cross that out, and attempt to write about a trip I made to Las Vegas. But I can't. I just can't. I light a fag and admire my work. The general impression of the page is of Mr Messy writes Bad Novel. I told the editor I would completely rewrite the piece but I can't do it. I change a few words around, and I phone the copytaker (they still exist), and I read it down the phone to her. She didn't laugh at any of the jokes.
There is a weird 1989-ish silence in my flat, except for the ticking of the Chairman Mao alarm clock, which sounds like insects having dirty sex. And I know what it is. It is the absence of my mother ringing me up to see how I am. (I think she lied when she said she wrote my landline number down. She plunged straight into denial.) My conversations with my mother normally go like this. "Are you all right?" says my mother. "Yes," I say. (I'm just not going there.) "Are you sure?" says mother. "Yes." "Are you sure?" Then, sometimes, to please her, I have a panic attack. Anyway, this isn't happening. The lack of mobile phone has cut us off.
Next I go and see my hypnotherapist, who is helping me to eat less. Going out is invested with drama now - will there be messages on my return? Will I feel contemptuous of the beeping people on the tube? I am a typical mobile phone user. I hate it when other people use their mobiles loudly but that never stops me doing it myself. I once had a fight with a man on the tube about it. I asked him to stop screaming into his mobile and he just said, down the mobile, "Some fat girl is shouting at me."
The hypnotherapist makes me keep a food diary. Before my self-imposed isolation, I would lie in the food diary, but now I scribble in restaurants while sitting behind 3ft-high yorkshire puddings. We discuss this. Then I go home - no messages! - and I sleep all day. I am, like Princess Diana, terminally exhausted by the silence. Later a friend rings to suggest that I am exhausted because the radio waves emanating out of my mobile phone are gone, and my system has collapsed. But I don't think it's that. Separation from email and phone is both ramping up and reducing the tension in me - and stuck in the middle, I hide.
The next day, I attempt to begin a book review. The book is about people who love animals and hate people. But I simply cannot take the form of writing on notepaper seriously. I am so distracted by the making of the words on the page that I cannot do it in my head. My spleen is weak, my viciousness is feeble and my metaphors are dire. (It is as if a goat tried to . . .) Can't do it. Sorry. I will have to attack the animal lover with Times New Roman some other day. So when my friend Raymond rings to say he is going to Bath I beg to be allowed to follow him there. "Lovely," he says, "call me when you get there." And I think - why? Why do I have to call again? Why can't I just meet you in the cake shop? "But I don't have a mobile," I say. "What am I going to do?" Then I have an idea. I will telephone him from a telephone box when I get there. It is so alien it is actually exciting. A telephone box!
Normally I book my train tickets online, but I can't do that. When I get to the station, I realise that a walk-on fare to Bath is £49. (If I had booked on the internet I could have got there for £30 and so I am enraged on behalf of the non-online grannies who go to Jane Austen's Bath to eat Mr Darcy Cream Teas and get fleeced by South West Trains). I get on the train, and have to listen to people talking rubbish into their mobile phones. My favourite line is "I'm in Swindon."
I get to Bath and I go into a phone box. Something strange has happened to them since I was last in one in 1994. What could it be? Ah. It doesn't smell of urine. Why not? Ah. Phone boxes are too unfashionable for people even to want to piss in them any more. I call Raymond and find my way to the cafe. No problem. I didn't even need to call to say, "Ten minutes away, five minutes away, one minute away, in the bathroom, sitting down opposite you and ordering a smoothie." I can almost relax. I walk around Bath feeling strangely disconnected. No one knows where I am. It is liberating. It is wonderful. I can sit in the shadows, and I won't even beep.
Back in London, I am beginning to get used to it, beginning to feel comfortable, beginning to enjoy it, beginning to relax, although I have completely given up on the idea of doing any writing. I can't write without my computer. But I am enjoying making calls on my landline. It feels solid, adult, formal. I only call when I need to, because it takes 13 seconds to dial a number on it. (I timed myself with Mao.) I phone not from need, but from purpose and I find I am actually having proper conversations. I say "How are you?" and I even listen to the answer. On a mobile, I can't listen. I will be distracted by call waiting or browsing for cheese in the supermarker. But now every telephone call is an event, not an involuntary nervous tick. I sit at my desk poised before the big yellow telephone. I have writing paper, pencils, a stamp. My transformation is complete. I have turned into the late veteran journalist WF Deedes.
Where are my friends, you may ask? I can't just hang out with my mother, my sister, my hypnotherapist and Raymond. Can I? Well, they are behaving as if I am unavailable. As if I am really WF Deedes. They do ring my landline, but only to talk about the landline. How is the landline, they ask. Is it all right? Is it different? Is it strange? And I spit back: what about me? When I suggest meeting up at Dunkin' Donuts in Piccadilly - a gateway to hell - they go quiet. "Do you feel comfortable leaving the landline?" they ask. They think I am ill. I sense they are talking about me behind my back.
On the last day, I get a letter from G2. A letter? Why not a pigeon? They want to know: please could I send this article over? And so I switch on my mobile and my computer, waiting for the messages begging me to return, to accept commissions and lovers and gold. And, guess what? There wasn't a single one. Nothing. I got an email from Louis Vuitton, though. I thought he was dead.
The real message is this. You don't need mobile phones and internet to live. You don't! Nothing terrible happened to me this week, well, nothing more terrible than usual. Life seemed slower, and slightly more rewarding. I felt less anxious, and had more time to myself. I lie in bed at night and read a book about Frank Sinatra being psychotic, when normally I would be manically surfing Wikipedia, on my own glittering cybertrain to psychosis.
These electronic toys are skilled at making you believe you are achieving things - working or interacting with those strange things I think are called other people. They give you the illusion of occupation and purpose. But it is false. You do nothing. You fritter and buzz and beep and shout "I'm in Swindon!", all the way to the grave.
Now, if you will excuse me, my telephone is ringing. It's almost certainly a pointless call, but I must answer it. Immediately.
