For the first time ever, I gave in to the pressure from my better half and agreed not to take my computer on vacation with me this year. A decision that proved hard to make as, also for the first time since starting my own business 15 years ago, we went away for 14 rather than 7 days.
Anyway, I cheated and smuggled my BlackBerry in the camera bag (one of those over the shoulder slingshot-backpack style Lowepro ones) which would at least ensure email contact and the odd bit of web browsing while hiding from the family.
Or at least that was the plan.
Unfortunately, I have discovered that the inhabitants of North Wales, or at least the bit of the Snowdonia National Park where we were staying (a 600 year old cottage, complete with bats and a ghost, in the middle of a forest half way up a mountain) don't have the luxury of mobile phone signals.
I have managed to get by while on myriad press trips to weird and wonderful locations all over the globe, even finding an Internet Cafe in a remote jungle village in Kenya much to my surprise a few years back, but North Wales got the best of me.
I was totally cut off for all but a few hours of my holiday, got the best signal from the summit of Mount Snowdon at 1000 metres above sea level but having climbed up there was too knackered to make use of it other than to send an email to my father-in-law to wish him happy birthday before crashing for an hour and climbing back down again.
The point being, that I have never thought of myself as being addicted to the Internet as such, but this experience has made me re-evaluate this. I now think that I am addicted to connectivity, be that email, mobile phone or web, I need something to get by. Far from being relaxing, I found myself getting increasingly stressed out as the vacation went on.
How sad is that? And more to the point, how unique is this - I wonder how many others are able to truly relax away from IT?