I Drove All Night

There was a time when you could slip off the radar and nobody would even know. They wouldn't panic, or think you’d vanished off the face of the earth, and they'd listen with vague interest when you’d come back with stories, sunburn, or new questions you’d found only because nobody could ping you with theirs. I've been thinking about that a lot lately.

About the silence we’ve lost.

Years ago, I was stuck in a rut. The kind that feels like you’re moving physically, but your mind is just pacing the same old room. So one morning, I woke up and said "fuck it" aloud to absolutely nobody. I shut my phone off, threw some clothes into a bag, and left my laptop and chargers on the kitchen table. I grabbed my keys, sat in my car, and turned on the engine.

I sat there for a few minutes, wondering if I should make a plan. I almost turned my phone back on three times. But after a while I sighed, once again exclaimed "fuck it" to absolutely nobody, put my phone in the glove box, and started heading north.

The landscape changed every hour. Hedgerows gave way to motorways, motorways to moors, moors to mountains, A roads to single tracks barely wide enough for two cars to pass. I didn’t turn the phone back on. I didn’t need to. I'd stopped thinking about it at all somewhere north of Birmingham.

After more than a day of driving, I finally ran out of island. I had reached John O’Groats, the last strip of the mainland, and realising I was in need of sleep and a shower I booked a cabin on a whim. No “Let me just check the reviews.” No “Where’s the best local restaurant?” Just me, a stranger at a reception desk, a mixture of accident and intent.

I spent days there. I watched the sun rise and set, swam in the freezing cold sea, and talked to strangers like they were old friends. I scribbled in my notebook, not for an audience but for the sheer pleasure of seeing thoughts I didn’t know I’d had land on paper. I listened to the wind more than the radio. I ate fresh food cooked by someone I’ll never meet again. I remember how it felt in my bones. Like all the noise I’d mistaken for connection had stepped out for a bit, leaving room for real questions to echo.

When I finally switched my phone back on, my mother was livid. No emergencies, no news, just a gap she didn’t know how to hold. A gap that, even a few years previously, we wouldn't have given a second thought to.

We’ve forgotten how to mind the gap.

These days, silence feels unnatural. If you’re not instantly reachable, it must mean something’s wrong. If you don’t reply within five minutes, are you angry? Have you ghosted someone? Are you unwell? We seem to measure love, friendship, reliability in read receipts and typing bubbles, like some digital proof that we’re still here, connected, and online.

But before the grid, there was the gap. There was time. You’d wait to tell someone about your day until you saw them. You’d miss people more because you couldn’t just drip-feed affection through a handful of blue ticks. You’d save up stories. Sometimes the waiting made the stories even better.

I miss that. I miss not knowing things immediately. I miss being unreachable, not as a rebellious act but as a completely normal one. I miss how curiosity used to unfold in layers, not in tabs opened all at once.

When I look back at my creative process before smartphones, I remember how much of it was spent simply staring out of a window. Walking without a podcast or an audiobook to justify the miles. Sitting with a thought long enough for it to rot into something better. Some of the writing I’m proudest of came from those gaps. They didn’t feel productive at the time. Heck, sometimes they felt pointless, indulgent, even boring. But that’s where the real work hid.

Now, when I try to recreate that quiet, it feels like swimming upstream. The whole world is engineered to interrupt you. A ping, a nudge, an alert telling you you haven’t closed your rings or answered that email. Sometimes my best friend messages me to ask how my day has been when he’s literally on the way to see me.

We can’t even hold a thought for fifteen minutes anymore.

So what is digital quiet now? I wish I could say I switch off for a week every month, but the truth is that, for me, it's far more mundane. It’s small rituals. I uninstall apps that don’t earn their keep. I leave my phone on silent in another room when I write. I try to walk without my headphones at least once a week, something I hated at first, but have come to really love. I stare out of train windows and refuse to feel bad for not using that time “productively.”

Most of all, I try to protect that hush inside my head. The one that lets me daydream badly, sloppily. The one that lets me write half a line and cross it out and come back to it three days later. It’s not a system. There’s no "life hack" for it. It’s just a decision to be unreachable.

Some days it works. Some days it doesn’t. But on the days it does, I write something true, something I didn’t know I needed until the silence let it through.

So if you’re reading this and any of it resonates, maybe take this as your gentle permission slip. You’re allowed to turn your devices off. You’re allowed to drift out of range. You’re allowed to let the world wait for you, just for a while.

You might not always be able to drive until you run out of island. But maybe go for a walk until you get bored and then, for a few more minutes, keep walking anyway.

Sit on a bench with your notebook and nobody else’s voice in your ear, and see what ends up on the page. I have a feeling the world will fill that silence for you if you let it.