Processional Giants and a Doomscroll-Free Holiday

Processional Giants and a Doomscroll-Free Holiday

An hour after arriving at my parents’ house in Menorca, I realised I didn’t have my phone. Despite multiple phone calls to the airport’s lost property hotline and the island’s only taxi company, its whereabouts remained a mystery. But on the last night of our stay, Ross phoned it for the thousandth time, and somebody answered.

A 70 euro return taxi journey later, my phone and I were reunited, and this felt like a reasonable price for the experience of having a few days without it. I am wary of the moral panic surrounding smartphones. Their increased prevalence coincided with a point in my life when I began to understand and take better care of my strange brain, and my mental health improved dramatically. I’m not saying they are good for our mental health, but I also suspect they are too easy a culprit for our woes. People have always been miserable and anxious, but we hear about it all the time now. So, I am a little sheepish about writing a Substack post about the joys of a smartphone-free holiday. I fear sounding smug or dangerously close to talk of ‘mindfulness’ or ‘being present’ or the sort of meaningless pseudo-speak that plagues our screens.

After getting over the initial panic of having no phone, I found that I hardly missed it. I thought I would feel the absence of a camera and podcasts or audiobooks in the rare moments I got to sit and paint or when I was doing boring stuff like emptying my parents’ dishwasher.

The dishwasher thing turned out to be a valid fear. Household tasks without something engaging to occupy my brain tend to feel like torturous drudgery, however much I try and accept them. But I found I was more than happy to paint in silence. I enjoyed listening to the frogs in our neighbour’s abandoned swimming pool or the chattering of birds. I painted more than I would have done, as I always need something to occupy my hands in an idle moment, and I didn’t have the option of scrolling through Instagram. I began adding ink lines to my paintings because it was quicker than getting my watercolours out when I only had a few minutes spare.

The lack of a camera turned out to be ok, too. I was rarely alone, so I would just ask Ross for his phone if I wanted to photograph something. When Ross and I were drinking at a bar on the harbour, a village procession came past us and two imposing Processional Giants stopped right in front of us, blocking our view. Ordinarily, I would have photographed them and shared them on social media, but instead, I quickly sketched the figures (I had my paints out already) until the noisy kazoo playing got too much, and we decided to move on. It’s not the sort of drawing I usually do, but I like them.

(The above postcards are available to buy for £15 each, inc p&p, email me if interested. If you upgrade to a paid subscriber, you are entitled to a 10% discount on all purchases and commissions.) I will also be teaching some watercolour classes and workshops at Bus Stop Studios in St Leonards-on-Sea this summer. More details here.

Later that evening, we stumbled upon a Creedence Clearwater Revival Covers band doing a concert in the village square to a handful of middle-aged locals.