2nd September

Just returned from a holiday - the first in quite a few years. We've done a
few camping trips and the like in the last couple, but I'd not been out of
the country in a fair while, and we spent the week in a relatively remote
house in Portugal.

With good weather, sunshine and a pool the kids were suitably entertained,
and the house had a good collection of paperbacks available. So for the first
time in a long time I got to do some dead tree reading, and other than the
daily dose of NYT crosswords I stayed by and large offline for the entire
time. In the end I read three books, over six days, and I genuinely can't
recall when that was last possible. It's quite possible that it's been over
30 years since I last came close to that.

The book that really grabbed me though was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It's
somehow of it's time (early 70s) and yet feels like it could have been
written yesterday. Though obviously what's missing is modern technology,
and to be perfectly frank, the world in that book felt all the better for
it.

I also read one of the Jack Reacher novels, set somewhere in the early
2000s (at a guess based on the tech involved), and that just served to
highlight how fast technology has reshaped the world since then. In many
ways the changes in the thirty or so years from the early 70s to then felt
far less impactful and complete than the changes we've seen since. Tracking
a phone via GPS was state of the art novelty stuff in the latter book, which
feels positively quaint today.

Turns out even when you're offline for a week, you can still find yourself
wishing that technological progress had somehow worked out differently, and 
fulfilled the dreams we had in the 80s and 90s vs the horrible, wasteful, 
intrusive ad-filled world we inhabit today.