Every few weeks at this time of year, my thumb betrays me. It hovers over a post of a cabin somewhere on the edge of a loch or moor, all shō sugi ban cladding, light oak, mid-century desks and ‘vintage’ lightbulbs, and presses like. The algorithm now thinks I’m the sort of man who wears wool socks and writes preposterously neatly in propelling pencil beside a woodburner. It’s not entirely wrong.
There’s something magnetic about those images: the design-led minimalism that’s somehow still warm; the promise of solitude that doesn’t look lonely. I imagine a week in one of them — laptop off, phone on airplane, words finally unspooling in peace. I can practically smell the Danish oil.
This time of year encourages such delusions. There’s just enough light in the mornings to feel alive, but enough dusk to make retreat seem reasonable. You could slip away for a week and no one would really notice. The trees are almost bare, the pubs half-empty, and the countryside looks half-finished, as if waiting for someone to turn up with a notebook.
In my head, I’m dictating into my phone while trudging through leaf-sodden lanes or across a windswept upland. Evenings mean simple food, one-pot stews, bread, the sort of red wine you can chew, and perhaps the odd night at a pub, purely for proof of humanity. I’d come back leaner, calmer, possibly holding the first chapter of The Book*.
Except I never go. Yes, a little because of fear or money (and the logistics of family life) but mostly because the fantasy works too well.. The idea of the week away does its job before it begins: it restores a sense of possible order. Just imagining the solitude feels productive, which is as close to it as most of us ever get.
What makes us crave it? Age, maybe – the mid-life suspicion that our attention’s been pawned off to apps and admin. Or perhaps it’s just winter and that soft command to draw inwards, to tidy one’s psyche before spring. Either way, the idea of leaving it all behind has become one more thing to scroll through, admire … and postpone.
I like to think it’s not laziness but calibration by which I mean a quiet audit of what would actually change if I went. Would I write more? Probably not. Would I look less at my phone? For a day, perhaps two. Mostly, I’d just be somewhere else doing the same gentle dance of distraction, albeit with better lighting and a view.
Still, the fantasy has its use. It reminds me there’s another tempo available, one I could, in theory, choose. And maybe that’s enough for now. Some people meditate. I browse cabins I’ll never book. We each find our way back to silence, even if it’s only through the screen.
AI: This piece was refined with AI, for the image prompt, tags, excerpt, and a little sub-editing. The ideas, references, and rhythm are mine and were composed in Surrey, not Scotland.
* this is my first public announcement that I do have a (non fiction) book in mind. It may also be the only time I ever mention it.
John Gibbard 