Part 5 · Multiple choice

A month without my smartphone

I did not give up my smartphone for any noble reason. I gave it up because I dropped it into a canal. The repair shop told me it would take four weeks to get the parts, and rather than buy a new one, I decided – partly out of stubbornness, partly out of curiosity – to see whether I could manage without. I dug an old mobile out of a drawer, one that could make calls and send texts and do absolutely nothing else, and waited to see what would happen. When I told my sister, who once spent a week in a cottage with no signal and talked about it for a year, she predicted I would last three days.

The first few days were uncomfortable in ways I had not anticipated. I had expected to miss the obvious things, such as maps and messages. What I had not expected was how often my hand would reach for my pocket for no reason at all: in the queue at the supermarket, at traffic lights, in the thirty seconds while the kettle boiled. Each time, I found nothing there, and each time I felt a small, ridiculous flash of panic, as if I had forgotten something important. It was only then that I understood how many tiny gaps in my day I had been filling without noticing.

By the second week, the panic had faded, and something else had taken its place. I began to notice things. I noticed that the man who sold newspapers outside the station whistled the same tune every morning. I noticed that I could finish a whole chapter of a book on the train, something I had not managed in years. Without a screen to look at, I also found myself talking to people more – not always successfully, it must be said. One elderly woman at a bus stop told me, at great length, about her neighbour's cat. I even began to sleep better, though whether that was the result of the experiment or simply of a quieter month at work, I honestly cannot say.

There were real inconveniences, of course. I got lost twice trying to find a friend's new flat and arrived at a restaurant forty minutes late. Arranging to meet anyone became a surprisingly complicated business, since every detail had to be fixed in advance and nothing could be changed at the last minute. My bank asked me to confirm a payment using an app I could no longer open, which led to a long and frustrating phone call. Friends, meanwhile, grew tired of having to describe on the phone things they would normally have sent me a link to. And I was forced to admit that, for all its faults, the smartphone does make certain parts of modern life a great deal easier. Anyone who claims otherwise has probably never tried to buy a train ticket at a station with no ticket office.

When the four weeks were up, I collected my repaired phone and, I confess, switched it on with considerable relief. My sister, who had lost her bet, insisted that a month did not really count. But I have not gone back to my old habits entirely. I have removed several apps that I realised I was opening out of boredom rather than need, and I now leave the phone in another room when I am reading. These are small changes, and I do not pretend they will transform anyone's life. Still, the experiment taught me something I had not expected to learn: that the problem was never really the phone. It was the habit of never allowing myself to be bored.

The first morning

The alarm went off at half past three, and for a moment I had no idea where I was. Then I remembered: it was my first morning at Hartley's, the bakery on the corner of our street, and I was due to start at four. I had applied for the job in a moment of enthusiasm after my parents had pointed out, not for the first time, that my savings would not pay for a summer of travelling. At the interview, Mr Hartley had asked me whether I was a morning person. I had said yes, which was not strictly a lie, since I had never tested the question at this particular hour. My friends, most of whom had found jobs in cafés and shops that opened at a civilised time, assumed I had lost my mind. I told them, rather grandly, that I wanted to learn a real skill. The truth was that Hartley's had been the only place to answer my application.

The street was silent and still dark when I let myself out. A fox crossed the road ahead of me, stared as though I were the one with no business being out, and slipped away between two parked cars. Through the bakery window I could see a single light burning at the back, and when I knocked, it was not Mr Hartley who opened the door but a small, grey-haired woman in a flour-covered apron. 'You'll be the new one,' she said, looking me up and down in a way that suggested she had seen several new ones come and go. 'I'm Iris. Hang your coat up and wash your hands. We haven't got all day.'

I soon discovered that Iris had worked at Hartley's for thirty-one years and that she regarded the bakery as hers in every way that mattered. Mr Hartley owned the building and paid the wages, but it was Iris who decided when the bread was ready, how thick the icing should be, and whether a new employee was worth keeping. She did not explain things twice. When I shaped my first batch of rolls, she picked one up, turned it over in silence and dropped it back on the tray. I waited for a comment, but none came, and it took me a moment to realise that this was, in its way, a sort of approval. Had the roll been badly made, I suspect she would have said so at considerable length.

By six o'clock my feet ached, my arms were covered in flour up to the elbows, and I had burnt my wrist on the edge of an oven tray. Yet I was surprised to find that I was enjoying myself. There was something deeply satisfying about the rhythm of the work: the dough rising under its cloth, the heat pouring out whenever the oven doors opened, the shelves slowly filling with loaves that had not existed an hour earlier. For the first time in months, I was not thinking about exams or what I was going to do with my life. I was simply thinking about bread.

At seven, Mr Hartley arrived to open the shop, cheerful and freshly shaved, and asked how I was getting on. Before I could answer, Iris said, 'She'll do.' He raised his eyebrows at me as if I had won a prize. Iris, he told me later, had never said it about anyone in their first week; or at least that was the version he liked to tell, and I chose to believe it.

I worked at Hartley's for three summers in the end, and I never did get used to the alarm. But whenever I smell fresh bread now, I think of that silent street, the single light at the back of the shop, and the two words that, at seventeen, meant more to me than any exam result.

A season on the island

When I first saw the advertisement – 'Volunteer wardens wanted, April to August, no experience necessary' – I almost scrolled past it. I was nineteen, halfway through a biology degree I was beginning to have doubts about, and the idea of spending five months on a rock in the North Atlantic counting birds did not obviously appeal. It was my flatmate, Jess, who persuaded me to apply. 'You're always saying you never actually see any of the animals you study,' she pointed out. 'Here's your chance.' I sent off the form mainly to stop her mentioning it, and was astonished when, a fortnight later, I was offered a place.

The island was smaller than I had imagined: you could walk round it in under two hours. There were no trees, no shops and no other people apart from Callum, the senior warden, and a second volunteer called Ravi. Supplies came over by boat once a week, weather permitting, which in practice meant rather less often. I remember standing on the jetty on the first evening, watching the boat disappear towards the mainland, and feeling something between excitement and panic.

Callum was not, at first, an easy person to work with. He was in his fifties, had spent twenty summers on the island, and seemed to regard conversation as an unnecessary use of energy. When I asked questions, he would answer in as few words as possible, and I spent the first fortnight convinced that he thought I was useless. It was Ravi who eventually explained that this was simply Callum's way. 'He talks to the birds more than to people,' he said. 'Give him time.' Sure enough, by the end of May, Callum had started to tell stories over dinner – about storms, about the year the puffins failed to breed, about his early days on the island – and I realised that his silence had never been unfriendliness, only shyness.

The work itself was harder than I had expected, and not in the way I had imagined. I had pictured myself sitting peacefully on a cliff top with a notebook. In reality, counting seabirds meant lying flat on wet grass for hours at a time, in wind strong enough to blow the pages out of your hands, trying to tell apart birds that all looked identical. There were days when I came back to the hut too cold to speak. Yet I never seriously considered leaving. Something about the routine – the same paths walked, the same colonies checked, the slow accumulation of numbers in the logbook – became oddly satisfying.

The moment I remember best came in July. Callum had asked me to check a burrow where a pair of puffins were nesting, and as I lay watching, a chick appeared at the entrance for the first time, blinking in the light. I had seen hundreds of photographs of puffins; I had even written an essay about their breeding success. None of it had prepared me for that small grey ball of feathers. I stayed there so long that Ravi came looking for me, worried that I had fallen off the cliff.

When I returned to university in September, people kept asking whether I had been bored. I found the question hard to answer. There had been no internet, no films and, for weeks at a time, no news of the outside world, but I could not remember a single moment of boredom. What I had lost, rather, was the habit of filling every spare minute. I went back to my degree with a clearer sense of why I had chosen it, and the following year I switched my final project to seabird ecology. Callum, characteristically, did not reply to my email telling him so – but he sent me a postcard of a puffin at Christmas.