It’s a hot night here in Slovenia. A pair of Italian women chat together in the garden below my window and their voices are keeping me from sleep. Somehow though, that glorious Italian cadence rolling through the night air is a joy; my wakefulness becomes a space for recall. I’ve journeyed for 6 weeks since I left my elderly host in North Uist, and my recall of events lies scattered like park leaves on an autumnal day.

Some memories rest multi-hued and vibrant, easy to shuffle through. Others seem more spidery in outline, or lie obscured by other recalls stuck across their surface, while some are simply too close as yet for me to see them in full.

One ‘leaf’ – the day my cellphone smashed – still seems all too vibrant and highly visible. Yet I notice how it too has been overlapped by other memories, the initial trauma now partially obscured.

The day had started off so well. I’d arrived on the sleeper train from Inverness after a superb cooked English vegan breakfast (a far cry indeed from the soggy cheese and tomato sandwiches of my British Rail childhood).

The sleeper train from Inverness had arrived in London ahead of time ‘to avoid issues from the Rail Workers strike’ we were told, so by 8am I was cycling across Waterloo Bridge. “How incredible,” I thought as I paused to celebrate the view down the Thames to Big Ben, “To be here in the centre of the city on my bike!” This traffic-free bike-friendly central London at rush-hour was an unexpected joy. Heading south, it seemed special to call in at the home of a good friend. Then, fuelled up on Earl Grey tea and a catch-up covering the past 40+ years, I set off towards Brighton. 

It was at that point that my oft-chosen strategy of ‘ignore it and hope it goes away’ let me down. Badly.  It was perhaps not surprising. I was back in the heavily-trafficked area outside the central London zone with a car following close behind. Unseen by motorists, the zone at the edge of roads is the bane of all cyclists. Road edges become slithered with road metal, or worse, broken glass; heat and the pressure of heavy vehicles warps tarseal into lumpy rolling ‘dunes’ or opens cracks wide enough to seize a bike tyre, or, as today, ill-completed maintenance projects leave serious holes. Experience has honed my ability to weave through this edge-of-the-road-obstacle-course but today though a black SUV was looming up close behind, only too visible in my rear-view mirror; I could find no evasive action, and my bike and I bounced across, into, and through a jagged pothole.

As you may remember, Dear Reader, my phone had hit the road once previously. On that occasion it had been swiftly collected and returned to me by a kindly passer-by.   Today though, there was no friendly pedestrian. My phone leapt like a fledgling from its nest on the handlebars, and I looked back just in time to watch it reappear behind the wheels of the vehicle behind: crushed.   It had happened before, now it had happened again, my ‘ignore the issue’ strategy had failed me. ‘Big-time’.

“it’s only a phone,” I said to myself, attempting to shift from mother-bird mourning into practicalities. Only those few of you with as little sense of direction as me will understand my panic: now I have no online map. Unlike so many of you, I hold no map in my head, so I’m now adrift in a very busy urban area with no strategy to find cycle-friendly roads. I’m far from comfortable. Fortuitously though, after 6 months of travel, my café-sensing abilities are well-honed and I find my way to WiFi capacity and a soy flat white (though nobody, I digress, makes them like Tom at my local ‘3^rd Wheel Café’ in Paihia). Anyway, I pull out my laptop, search for the nearest phone repair shops ,and Croydon fortunately seems to have streets of them, and note the directions ‘the old-fashioned way’ on a piece of paper.

At the phone shop, a friendly-seeming technician advises me that despite the odd yellow light still glowing under the smashed glass, my phone is irreparable. And no, the data cant be retrieved. The sense of powerlessness and insecurity I feel around digital technology means I fail to seek another shop and a second opinion. With a grimace, I purchase a ‘new’ reconditioned phone as similar as possible to my old one. 

And this is where the cautionary tale comes in – do you, dear reader, have your phone data backed up? Your contacts list for example? Your precious family photos you have received from others? Your WhatsApp conversations you’d like to refer back to? 

It is when I cant work out how to resolve an issue, that my ‘ignore it and hope it goes away’ strategy comes into play. Here too I’d adopted this same idea for phone back-ups. There is a tension between my integrity and the value I hold in ‘treading lightly on the earth’ in the use of the energy-intensive ‘Cloud’. Awareness that vast energy-hungry data servers, hidden contributors to global warming, currently store my photos, social media ‘memories’ and Google Drive files, mean I can’t bring myself to add my phone back-ups too. Indeed, I spend hours on my bike considering how to downsize and live ‘Cloud-free’. So being caught between wishing security for my phone data and not wanting to add to climate breakdown, I hadn’t spent time to find a strategy that better aligned with my values, instead I’d opted to do nothing.  

I mourned most for my Contacts List, along with WhatsApp and Text messages I could no longer revisit. These were my lifelines as a traveller, my only strand of connection to new burgeoning friendships as well as to some less-digital friends, fruitful relationships that have aged like vintage wine.

It is only because I am as yet in thrall to the Cloud more than I want to be that I was let off lightly. Messenger,  Gmail and Google Photos were holding my data on those giant servers somewhere, heating the planet, and in doing so, held many strands of connection I’d otherwise have missed. Fortuitously, too I carry my NZ Sim Card with me; just the previous week I had attempted to challenge the Yahoo corporation to live up to 24/7 helpline practices stated on its website: ‘We will stay on the phone with you until your problem is resolved’.

A wish to help my elderly HelpX host in Inverness retrieve access to his emails had been met with that corporate ‘cant be done’ response: “You’ve come through to our American help centre, our UK one is no longer operational. Yes if you were registered in the States, we could sort that for you, ma’am.” My response that, “But it states on your website that you have a 24/7 UK helpline and this is the number I have just called, may I speak with your manager,” approach took me nowhere, and I learnt later that even our carefully composed email to the UK Ombudsman had been to no avail. ( Could, I wonder, the outcome have differed if I’d had time to continue my dogged approach?) But I digress.

I could enable data roaming for my NZ number, and this unlocked a magic carpet to codes necessary to reinstall my banking App and navigate the maze of the Gmail ‘2-step security system’, the same system chosen by Yahoo which had permanently locked out my elderly host.

Oh how I longed though for the ease with which I could find my way around my old phone. I mourned too the screen saver photos of family. And with each App I wanted to reinstall including that wizard of bike navigation, Komoot, I was reminded of that most traumatic aspect of my digital life, the requirement to remember and input passwords… 

A week later though, something extraordinary happened at 5.30am!  After a wearying day’s cycle ride north from Brighton the previous day, albeit lightened by hedgerow blackberries, I was in a deep sleep at an inspiring Quaker-initiated barn eco-hostel.  Unlike my usual response to my phone alarm, today as I was jolted from my sleep, I felt moved almost to tears. For here was my smashed-up old Samsung (which for some reason I’d decided to recharge fully overnight), repeating the alarm set a week prior to ensure I didn’t miss that excellent breakfast in the dining car of the Sleeper train.  A happy thought arose, “Is my fledgling alive after all, trying to communicate with me, its mum ?”

And so it seemed. The strange yellow glow at the base of a cracked black screen had now morphed and the pin number screen was now obscure but visible.  By muscle-sense rather than sight, due to the cracks, I input my PIN, and now could glimpse my screen-saver family photo pics.  My phone’s brain seemed partially healed! After an amicable breakfast with my journalist room mate (who’d kindly assured me she was an early riser and already awake – I’d been unable to turn off the alarm – picture me stumbling down to the end of the garden in the dawn light ) I headed along the tree-lined North Downs Way.

At a very helpful phone repair shop in the beautiful city of Guildford, my phone, may it rest in peace, was deemed irreparable. Yet the much-cleverer-than-I technician could transfer my old data stored into my new phone via a cable.  Yay!  The screens are now the same as before, the contacts are back and so are the Apps.

So did I learn my lesson? Hmmm…. Lets be glad the handlebar phone holder is now a much safer nest for my fledgling: if the screw bolt should fail, two foraged elastic hair ties now prevent my new phone from jumping out without my motherly approval. But have I put a back-up system in place for my data? Er, not yet. I havent resolved my antipathy to The Cloud so, for now, Im maintaining my tried-and-found-wanting ‘ignore it and hope for the best’ strategy. Well, it didn’t work out too badly in the end, eh?    

post script:

Lest you, dear reader, sense my entire journey through September was reduced to phone concerns, may I assure you to the contrary. Many and varied are other vibrant scattered leaves that lie on the floor of recent memory. Such tales await another fine blog….