And it was lovely.
I had to take my phone with me in the end as we didn't want to leave it in the car but I put it in the suitcase with no power at all, and didn't charge it until the Friday night. With a couple of text messages exchanged between me and my mum and me and a friend the phone went back off, ready for when we got back to the UK on the Sunday.
I spent the time I would have been on my phone writing a holiday diary and reading a proper book. It has been so lovely and refreshing, and holding my phone in my hand to write this (I was bored on the plane so got my phone out to draft some posts) seems quite bizarre. After just a week I seem to have forgotten how to use it. The keyboard seems foreign and my phone feels so thin.
We sit in buses, we sit in the airport and I realise how unsociable we are now. We can't sit and have a conversation with strangers because we are too busy on Facebook or Candy Crush. We lose the ability to have a proper conversation. To talk about anything other than the weather.
We stumble and hesitate when it comes to finding out someones name simply because we don't know how to ask, at least not without getting our phones out and asking if they have Facebook.
People just want to exchange email addresses now and don't want to be old skool and send a letter and become pen pals. This is something I'm encouraging with the boys and I want them to learn the importance of writing letters and how exciting it is to recieve a hand written letter in the post. This holiday we bought a postcard, Charles wrote his friends a note asking if they would like to become pen pals, and we gave them our address. 5 minutes letter, we had their address too, as well as email and Facebook because it is acceptable to communicate in the modern way as well as the traditional way so I'm definitely not contradicting myself for gladly accepting those details (and I have photos that they need to be tagged in, obviously).
On the plane there are few people reading a proper book. Instead there are ipads and Kindles with games and catch up tv, the odd person reading a book on theirs. The younger of the passengers are not looking out of the window, unless being forced to by their parents. They don't seem at all interested in the world below them, the land and water we are flying above.
And it makes me sad because, without wanting to sound old, these are the next generation, and if they don't appreciate what it out of the window then how will their children?
