Do you ever wonder how you can better connect as a family? I would hardly be the first person to suggest that disconnecting from everything else might be an answer. But then I inadvertently did just that last weekend.
The cause was my own ineptitude. Having recently upgraded our home Wi-Fi, I confidently asserted that the new router – which had arrived on Saturday morning – could be hooked up straight away. Yet I had failed to read the small print: the service didn’t start until Monday. And when we reconnected the old router, it was no longer recognised. A call to the provider offered no solution.
In its sudden absence, we felt the power of the internet more keenly than ever before. The children could not scroll social media on their tablets; Alexa fell silent; the Xbox offered no fun; my daughter could not access her homework on her laptop; we could not use the printer.
We were not quite cut off. We had our phones and could hotspot internet data to other devices if really necessary. Even so, normal weekend life felt interrupted.
My son was aghast, his world narrowing before his very eyes. I sent a text to my daughter, who was out for the day, warning her of the problem. A stream of WhatsApp messages came in reply:
“What do you mean?!”
“Bruh!”
“STOPP!”
There may have been some teenage satire in there somewhere, alongside the angst, but the irritation was real.
Yet by Saturday evening, the hard reality had come to be accepted. We told our son to pretend he was living in the 1990s – he still had terrestrial TV after all. So, after eating pizza for his dinner, unbothered by radio burbling from Alexa in the background, he settled down to watch a game show with his granny. As my wife and I were out for the evening, he couldn’t even check the sports results on our phones. And guess what? Everything was not only fine, but everyone had a really good time.
On Sunday, we doubled down. On a gloomy afternoon, unable to squirrel away to various parts of the house with separate devices, we congregated in the sitting room. My daughter sat with her legs dangling over the arm of a comfy chair, engrossed in a book. A CD played through our aged stereo in the same corner where the Wi-Fi router sat idly by.
My wife and son used Jenga blocks to make domino runs. That made me think that we had not played dominoes for years, so out they came too, as did a pack of playing cards and Connect 4. I told my son he would never beat me at the latter, but at the fifth attempt, he did, and was delighted. We played closely fought games of rummy, lying on the floor in front of the fire.
Forget the Nineties, this felt like a scene from the Fifties. Indeed, with the fire drawing poorly, we had period pollution to match.
Later, we watched Countryfile on the Beeb, then Antiques Roadshow, guessing the values of prized items and laughing at the faces of the punters who had hoped to hear better news about their heirlooms-come-tat.
It was hardly a complete digital detox, but I couldn’t remember the last time we had spent the bulk of an afternoon together in the house without doing anything very much. It was good-tempered, funny, reassuring. But it also made me despair at the rarity of it – and the degree to which so many aspects of our daily lives have come to revolve around, even rely on, the internet.
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There were legitimate frustrations. Most notably, my daughter tried to get on with some homework but found things glitchy on her computer when hotspotting from my phone, so she gave up. Schools take note.
What’s more, had we not had web access on our phones, all sorts of other things would have proved troublesome – from showing theatre tickets that had been sent via email, to checking train times. In the event of a total digital outage, dominoes and cards might only go so far.
Still, our Wi-Fi-less weekend showed me a side of family life I see too little of. The new router is up and running now – but its off switch may come in useful.
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