Friction between the home secretary, Theresa May, and culture secretary, Sajid Javid, over mobile phone coverage was made public today, and you could be forgiven for cursing their good luck. Not that of the rowing cabinet ministers, but of the fifth of the UK fortunate enough to lack decent mobile phone reception.
And no, if you’re an angry commenter communicating with your broadband provider from a Hebridean island by smoke signal right now, trying to fan the smoke into a comment that will read “smug metropolitan writes silly article about something of which he has no experience”, please relax and put down your bundles of damp grass. You’re two weeks out of date, and I’ve experienced the bliss of living in several mobile blackspots.
In rural Suffolk neither telephone nor television signal reached my house. In one Norfolk town I fondly recall many an evening on the rain-lashed promenade, huddling in the phone box and inserting coins to purchase time on a telephone line for want of a signal. There might even have been a well-spoken, nosy operator who would place my calls – or that might just be nostalgia.
Of course if you want to run an all-singing, all-dancing digital media corporation, you might want to leave the Peak District. If you spend your days and nights politely explaining your campaign to improve the ethics of games journalism by mowing down female players in multiplayer Call Of Duty, and require heavy bandwidth for your ethical crusade, you might want to move away from north Wales.
Before you do, remember that the remaining four-fifths of the population suffer from the tyranny of constantly being connected. As satirist Nimrod Kamer suggested at a talk last week digital inaccessibility has a cultural cachet, and in an age of hyperconnectivity we are increasingly admiring of those smart enough to switch off.
With the release of the film Interstellar, we’re reminded that one of Hollywood’s most talented directors, Christopher Nolan, has neither an email address or a phone. Comic legend Bill Murray doesn’t have an agent, let alone a Twitter account. The success of these individuals provides hope that the age of shameless social media self-publicity, instant access and constant availability may not endure. There is more to life than being able to call and email from every corner of the country, but it’s sometimes hard to spot between all that emailing and all those calls.
May’s concerns over extending coverage are ostensibly linked to terrorism. I can’t fathom if that means living in a mobile blackspot ensures none of your neighbours are plotting acts of terrorism, or if everyone is and it helps the spooks work out where they are. Either way, that’s an issue we should leave the security services to worry about.
Since I moved to a city with excellent 4G signal I have found it much harder to read books, or to get any activity finished without stopping to check Twitter. I wrote an entire (utterly dreadful) novel while holed up in remote north Norfolk for a few months, but have barely completed the outline of the book project I’ve been pursuing while living in London.
Just as the countryside provides physical space, the freedom from digital connectivity has an intangible but real quality. Living in a house with no phone reception means that when you arrive home you can’t be disturbed by work, which is why the best holidays for most of us in the 21st century have been the ones to places that have no mobile phone coverage. From clothing to fake woodland logs there is now an industry built on blocking out mobile phone coverage, with more people realising that it isn’t an unqualified benefit of modern life. For the Twitter addict, walking around with a smartphone with a signal is like an obese person towing around a fully stocked fridge (without the health benefits of all that increased cardio effort). Of course this is a relatively minor, first world problem, but you knew that before you clicked on the link.
So I hope that May wins her fight against Javid, not least because she’s having a pretty terrible week of it and could do with some good news, but also because of the thing about terrorism, and because it’s brilliant that there are still places you can go on earth and not be able to stream Gossip Girl. Places where you can sit, read, write awful screenplays, and enjoy the view. Yes, it’s a hardship for those that live there and who want to be able to set up 3D visualising companies from a shack surrounded by boggy moor, and yes, “one-fifth” of the UK probably does include some relatively urban places that deserve better coverage. But gaining a signal means losing something, too.
