A weekend without my mobile phone was a blessing in disguise
It happened halfway down the Euston Road, and the extent of the physical symptoms were a shock in themselves. In a fully packed car - on our way to drown at Glastonbury Festival for the weekend - as the travel news came on the radio my stomach hit the floor. I had forgotten my mobile phone.
Everything had been put on to charge the night before - camera, iPod and phone. But somehow, in the rush to get out the door at the ungodly hour of 7am (to avoid the London rush hour) with wellies, blankets, bin-liners and everything else required at this festival to celebrate the annual British monsoon, that final item had been left to continue charging. I was now faced with a weekend completely exiled from the network.
The first year I went to Glastonbury, there was no network. Although, by that time, mobiles were already the type of technology many people owned, when those many people descended on a small village in Somerset, the network packed up, packed its bags and went to Cornwall. The following year, Orange started its sponsorship, and festival-by-mobile began.
Once, bumping into friends and lovers on the muddy trudge between the folk stage and the falafel shop was the way it worked at Glasto. But, as connectivity onsite has increased, the sight of happy clusters of people made even happier by serendipitous encounters with friends has gradually been replaced by that of the lone, distressed reveller wandering blindly around the festival and shouting "Where are you?" into his mobile phone.
A quick survey of the four passengers in the car with me on the way down revealed that we were packing no fewer than a dozen pieces of personal technology between us (minus, of course, my mobile). One friend remembered the first time he took a mobile to Glastonbury. It was too precious to risk on site, so he left it locked in the glove compartment of his car. Now, he imagined, the rise of camera phones would mean that performances after dark would be accompanied by a sea of mini-screens, shimmering in time to the music, each one reflecting a tiny image of the band on stage.
As it turned out, it was umbrellas, not mobile phones, which obscured my view of the main stages for most of the festival. And although I didn't get to take up Orange's kind offer to "text my photos and comments to *82266", I didn't miss out on much by leaving my phone at home. I neatly avoided the event that every hardcore Glastonbury fan dreads - contact from the outside world. And for one weekend only, I was the boss of me - I could watch a didgeridoo player for three straight hours and no SMS could summon me away.
In fact, I had so much fun on my weekend offline, that I'll be leaving my phone at home again next year.
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