Imagine how many times a day your thumb glides across the screen of your phone, taps an app and you find the whole world at your feet.
Now imagine a world without Wi-Fi.
Tricky, isn’t it?
It wasn’t until this week when mine disappeared that I realised the visceral reaction my hand has to my phone being unresponsive. I’ve tapped only to discover an ether. An unsettling emptiness.
Whilst muscle memory led my fingers to briefly atrophy, my brain was gladly making peace with the quiet.
What now?
What could we rediscover?
I shuddered my way down an inevitable path.
The iTunes library.
Untouched for years. Cobwebs abound. Dust thick as snow swirling from the Cloud.
I’ve grown so used to Spotify facilitating my musical habits that I’d almost forgotten what it was to im and am over whether I loved a song or an album enough to spend a predetermined sum on it.
Whilst much of what I found will be staying firmly put on a sooty shelf, I felt the irresistible pull of nostalgic charm as I revisited this lost land. A land that was all-consuming as little as five years ago.
Two albums whispered to me in particular. Their lyrics slowly appearing through the dense mists of my mind.
One reminded me of a friend. The other I find inexplicably beautiful.
There’s no reason for me to feel such an affinity to the latter, offbeat collection.
The words don’t relate to me. It doesn’t make me think of anyone. In fact, I almost never listen to it.
And yet, every so often when the disappearance of technology compels me, I yearn to be taken back into its musty embrace.
Seldom listening to this bizarre assortment of whimsical majesty is perhaps why I’ve deigned to bestow it with deity.
But these random retreats to the rhythm of melodic poetry allow me to overlook all that.
The uncanny allure of this artistry is that you can truly lose yourself in an intoxicating, perfectly balanced, combination of sound and feeling which inexplicably leads to clarity.
It’s perhaps the one and only time recklessly abandoning your thoughts in wild pursuit of another’s doesn’t feel irresponsible.
You see everything through a different gaze and somehow it feels more like your own than the possessions strewn about you. Like you’ve been waiting your whole life for this stranger to help you make sense of the rain running down your windowpane, or the curious thoughts which occur to you in the depths of the night.
It’s not that I’m embarrassed to name the album or artist, more a fondness of keeping the secret; the notion of something I love being uniquely mine.
I know the truth, of course. We all do.
But I’m not sure if I’ll ever be ready to forgo the warmth of this blissfully naïve delusion.
Modernish 