Analogue

Bad at my phone, European trains, editing on paper

I’m in hot Berlin sunlight, with a phone battery that drains like water. No battery pack, and not even a working charger anywhere, which feels like an extra level of tiny peril; very tiny, because all it takes is to walk into one of the many phone repair shops on Hermanstraße, and a mere five euros later I have the theoretical capacity to charge my phone. But for those couple of hours when I have no charger available to me anywhere in the city, I feel unmoored. Then I catch myself and feel like an idiot; I know how to walk home, there is no urgent call waiting for me, I have everything I need. If necessary, I could go without a phone all day.

Earlier I’d let my phone greedily drink up as much charge as possible from my boyfriend's charger, before he packed it to fly home without me. Even with the new charger in my hand I have no plug, adaptor, or electricity source, and so I put my phone back on airplane mode as I go back down the street, the way I have been doing for days now. Secretly, I’m enjoying it. I don’t reply or scroll, or if I do it’s fervent, with intent. Checking something specific, as quickly as possible; catching my hand as it slips into my bag, my pocket, idly thinking to see what is going on elsewhere.

I traveled from Berlin to Ljubljana on the train a few days ago, a journey of ten hours, narrow changes at Munich and at Villach. Because there’s not always one on British trains I didn’t know if there would be a charging point, and needed my phone so I could show my ticket, but there was. There was no signal for most of the journey, though, especially when we hit the mountains. I didn’t want to take my laptop on the journey, superstitious about losing it. I took my notebook and a printed out version of my novel-in-progress to make notes, read a whole book, looked at river and landscape and distant snow. I used my phone to mainly take photos, especially on the beautiful last leg, so many that the man sharing my train carriage laughed at me, but kindly. I couldn’t help it. The water was so blue! The sunset on the mountains – the silver lining in missing my last connection and getting the next train, two hours later – so unordinary.

I don’t believe in the badness of phones, but I believe in the badness of my own brain, and how cutting myself off from the machine in my pocket leaves me feeling more awake, smoother, sometimes more bored. But then it’s good to be bored, and scrolling is its own, panicked, kind of boredom – the static thrum of it filling my head which, admittedly, longs to be filled.

In Berlin the cafes where I’m working have signs up everywhere sternly proclaiming No Laptop, and sometimes this is ignored, but I’ve been enjoying the excuse to work without it. Editing on paper is soothing – the dopamine rush of slashing through paragraphs and pages, writing make this better or this just isn’t working, sometimes deferring problems to later, sometimes forcing myself to think about them then and there. And it’s faster, shamefully much faster, without the internet.

I walk the length of Tempelhofer Feld to get to a small kiosk where there are tables and deckchairs under paltry shade, a place too bright to read a laptop screen, and here I manage to read through a big chunk of the entirety of my draft, drinking rhubarb soda and moving with the sun. There is nothing else to demand my attention except the words, except the problems knotted into the words, my responsibility to solve.

The best days are when they are essentially unremarkable but you think I will remember this my whole life, and I will remember sitting there, breeze moving the pages, the back-to-school feeling of writing down the things that need to be fixed, hand moving with purpose and with excitement, and walking back the length of the Feld with my notes. Alone and walking fast in hot sunlight, the phone battery having died hours ago. I didn’t tell anyone about that feeling then because I couldn’t, but I am telling you about it now.