Three nights without a phone signal

We rented a cabin on a lake for three nights in late July. The listing said “limited connectivity”, which turned out to mean that if you stood on the end of the jetty and held the phone above your head you might get a single message through, eventually, if the wind was right.

After the first evening we stopped trying.

The cabin had one room, a wood stove, a bucket for water and a very good kettle. The stove smoked whenever the wind came from the north, so on the second day we learned to open the little door slowly and to keep the damper half closed. By the third day we were quite proud of ourselves.

What we did with the time, roughly:

• Swam before breakfast, when the water was flat and the mist was still lifting.
• Read. I finished one book and started two others.
• Walked around half the lake and back, which took most of an afternoon.
• Watched a pair of black-throated divers at the far end of the bay every evening.
• Played a long, slow, unserious game of cards that nobody won.

The strange thing was how long the days felt. Not boring, just long, in the way days felt long when I was ten. On the drive home the phone found a signal at the first village and buzzed for almost a minute straight. Nothing in there was urgent. Nothing ever is.