Try this experiment. The next time your phone beeps you with a text message don’t answer it for five minutes. I bet you can’t do it. I bet you can’t look at ‘message received’ and not press ‘view’. I bet like me you get a tight feeling in your chest after just ten seconds. After 30 seconds you will suffer shooting pains down your left arm and after one minute, if you manage one minute, you will become lightheaded, see stars and very possibly black out.
This is because you have been conditioned to the tyranny of the instant response. You are condemned to being endlessly available to absolutely anyone who happens to know 11 digits that may as well be the code to your soul.
I don’t know why we accept this as the status quo when clearly there was a time when people had to arrange to speak to each other face to face at appointed hours of the day, and when the evening might be the only time one was expected to answer a telephone. These were also eras when human feats of accomplishment and endeavour seemed to carry along unperturbed by the absence of 24/7 instant communication.
Well, I have had an epiphany. I have been given cast iron evidence, direct from the almighty (I don’t want to overstate this, but I really do feel like I’ve seen a blinding light, so bear with me) that we were never meant to become enslaved to a small, vibrating square of plastic.
What happened is this. I was riding my horse one Sunday morning across a beautiful field. The sun was shining, the air was filled with the scent of the summer’s first cut of hay, all was right with the world. And then my mobile phone beeped.
Before you say ‘there’s your mistake’, I have considered not carrying a phone when I ride but it is a useful thing to have in case of emergencies. Usually I ride with it switched off in my pocket. But on this occasion I had forgotten to turn it off. So when it beeped I heard it. And having heard it I was powerless to resist.
I fished it out of my pocket as we rounded a bend in the field and read the message. It was an astonishingly rude text from a government spin doctor accusing me of making up a story I had written in that day’s paper about the impending abolition of Regional Development Agencies. As a colleague of his had rung me and briefed me about this news item two days earlier, I took exception to this. I was pretty cross to be accused of lying, of course. But most of all I was deeply insulted by the notion that even if I had taken to the practice of making things up, I should waste my time and reputation by inventing the most mind-numbingly boring story in the world. I was so angry I dialled the press officer’s number and, as he didn’t pick up, left a rant on his answerphone. I wanted to leave him in no uncertainty that should I decide to start lying in print I would not waste my time embroidering a tale about the future of regional business quangos as my contrivance of choice, but rather I would go for something a little more entertaining, probably involving his boss Eric Pickles and a troupe of Latvian dancing girls.
I had barely warmed to my theme when my horse stepped off the track and slipped into a ploughed part of the field where her back leg disappeared deep into some churned-up earth. Seconds later she was hopping lame.
Of course I cannot be sure that it was wonky steering that did it. But I feel instinctively that it was probably the case at the precise moment I was arguing with a Tory press officer’s answer machine about RDAs — literally, arguing about nothing with nobody — my beloved horse trod on an animal bone that travelled all the way up through the soft part of her hoof into something crucial called the navicular bursa and pierced a hole in the flexor tendon.
Hours later she was having emergency surgery in an equine hospital, after which a grim-faced surgeon told me there was only ‘a prospect’ that she might pull through. She fought off an infection for five days and spent a miserable week being sedated, pumped with drugs and having endless dressings changed. But I guess we got lucky, because three weeks later she is well enough to come home.
I am going to pick her up from the hospital today. And in case anyone who works for Eric Pickles is thinking of texting me, I will be switching off my mobile phone.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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