On a flight back from Sydney yesterday, I had a sudden revelation. No-one could contact me for the next 5 hours, unless I suppose there was a very real emergency and the authorities could get a message through via the flight deck. However, I cannot imagine what sort of emergency that would be, and even then, there is bugger all I could do until landing.

So, except for whatever conversation the person next to me wanted to engage in (none hopefully and a set of Panasonic noise cancelling headphones usually fixes that), I was totally and utterly free of phone calls, text messages, emails, Facebook, Twitters, faxes – everything.

What bliss!

I indulged.

First I read Motor magazine from cover to cover, dribbled over Ferraris and then followed this with an hour of music from my Zune (Spock’s Beard if anyone is interested). Next I got serious and edited half a dozen stories for AusCam magazine, ZIPPED up the associated images and placed them all in the appropriate folder for later ftp’ing to our server.

Then I watched an episode of Torchwood on my ASUS EeePC that was stored on an 16GB Transcend USB stick.

And it was good.

I now wonder, are we TOO contactable? I remember in the early 80’s, a mate called Chris who I have since lost contact with, and who was a programmer at the original WARCC at the WA Uni on Cyber computers opined one day we should have the ability to contact each other anywhere in the world at anytime as the technology was there. It took another 8 years or so for the original mobile phone brick to appear. But he was sort of visionary. (Chris, if you are out there, do contact me!)

Today though, have we just gone too mad with the ability to converse, text, video and email? Have we lost the ‘timeout’ ability to think, create and muse? Perhaps we all need a shed to retreat to, with no computer, no power and no wifi where we can just sit and think. A bonus would be rain on the tin roof and a potbelly stove in the corner.

And a nice single malt scotch.