'My brain had completely run out of RAM'
A TV audio engineer's quest to find the off button
My bedroom currently boasts not one, but two overflowing suitcases. Their entrails strewn unapologetically about their carcass by the 3am scavenger who needs two pairs of socks and a black tee to hurry-off to a gig in London or a job in Europe or a last-minute transatlantic flight.
This is the lifestyle I have led for a while now: a carefully curated chaos.
I work mostly as an audio engineer for TV and Music Touring, and the technical side of these industries is presently crippled by an enormous skills shortage after years of companies not investing in any training of budding youngsters, and the COVID years pushing the chaps with delightful pensions and countryside estates into retirement. Those of us left are consequently all burnt-out. We are all flitting haplessly around the planet in order to put the programmes on the telly and the artists on the stages at all costs. To be fair, it’s a lucrative game for us, but the pay checks do somewhat obfuscate, or at least dilute, the physical and mental costs of such a manically fast-paced working world.
In recent months, the madness has taken a turn for the extreme. We were already doing more than ever before, our schedules were already crammed, each job just about dovetailing into the next… and then the Queen went and died. Every schedule got thrown high into the air. Those of us contracted for the funeral broadcast events were notified first by anonymous, automated phone call that “Operation Lion, London Bridge” was in effect, and then required—from wherever in the world we were—to get our butts back to London to facilitate this mammoth project. And after ten days of that quite extensive madness, all the other jobs that were so neatly fitted in before began squabbling for crew, upping the money, reducing the planning time and attempting to rebook themselves in to everyones already-full diaries.
It was exhausting. I am exhausted.
I noticed that I began stumbling for words in sentences because my brain was just running out of RAM. I noticed that I developed ‘email-apnea’, holding my breath for up to a minute at a time whilst writing complex technical emails or programming equipment. I began to lose track of friends and family, and I couldn’t brush my teeth without being distracted by at least three other tasks in that two-minutes.
These are all red-alert warnings. Huge flashing beacons signalling that I needed a break.
And so I sacked off a job, clawed back a whole two days off over a weekend (my first in three months), and I booked myself two days in Ruby, a little lodge to be found in a remote woodland in North Norfolk.
I’d heard about Unyoked from one of my Australian friends here, as well as the ‘dose of nature’ afforded by the cabins they have placed around the planet in woodland and wild spaces, all in the middle of nowhere. It promised to be a chance to switch off entirely, to unplug without so much as the option of logging back on since most are situated in spots where cell service has not yet dared to venture.
Naturally, I had to re-arrange said two-day escape twice at the last-minute (classic me) on account of work-related mayhem. But eventually, and only 6 weeks later than planned, I managed to get out there.
I arrived later than I planned; 1am instead of 3pm, but what’s 10hours between a man and his wilderness? After a delightful two hours’ drive and some remarkably philosophical chats with my Uber driver, we pull off the track and into the little muddy parking space. Fully-equipped with head-torch and several cans of soup, I wave goodbye to William, lump my belongings into the wheelbarrow they leave for you, and set off down the endless tunnel of trees, trudging my way through the darkness and into the wild.
It’s about two hundred metres before you reach the first clearing and meet the cabin itself. A sweet little deck out front, a fire pit with sitting logs ready-to-go, two huge windows and a little chimney just peeking between the roof-tiles.
It’s a beautifully homely wooden interior: Kitchen, fridge, huge comfy bed, separate bathroom, log burner, dining table. For the first time in years I reach for a radio (complete with authentic pull-out metal stick antenna and ‘clink clonk’ cassette-tape controls) and thumb its radio dial to some soothing classical lullabies. They’ve delivered a couple of bags of wood, ready-cut to fit the little burner in the room, so I arrange a firelighter, kindling and some logs in the formation I learned in my youth camps, and slowly begin to heat the place up.
It’s the silence that gets you. When you first quit moving about, cloth and skin finally quietening down to allow the nothingness in. I’m not sure what I expected to hear above the faint strings from the battery-radio, I guess I thought the forest would be alive at night. But no, it’s as still as I am, now lying back on the bed with nothing but Debussy and the muted cracks and pops of a catching log in the fireplace, stifled by its heavy iron door I rustle out of my coat, clothes and boots. I check the time on my phone, noting its signal bars pulsing, hunting for a connection to the outside world it simply can’t find. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, let the day’s efforts tumble out, and I am gone.
It’s mid morning before I wake up. The sun is blasting through the windows begging me to rise and survey the view before me, and boy is it a treat when I do. In the light of day I can see so much more; the window at the foot of the bed peering out at the intersection of two long, straight passages through the forest, leading god-knows where. It’s a lush green in every direction, blue skies sprawl overhead despite the October chill. And for the first time in months, I have nothing to achieve, no deadline to meet, no train to catch, no emails to write, no-one to be and nowhere to go except for here, in this little patch of wilderness, in this little, somehow viscous, sliver of time. So I go back to sleep, of course.
There’s a little booklet wedged into my back when I do finally stretch and roll out of the bed properly; a guide to being ‘unyoked’. It offers some suggestions of what one might busy ones-self with in such a place if the need arose to ‘do’ anything at all: “go and find your favourite tree and give it a cuddle” is one of my favourite suggestions.
Shuffling around the place in the light now, I find a cute collection of books which includes three titles from Robert Macfarlane, each exploring a different aspect of our connection to the world around us. (NB. I thoroughly recommend ‘Underland’.) There’s cassette tapes of classic albums to pop into the deck and dive deep into their retrospection. There’s fancy tea, fancy coffee, everything the modern city-wanker would need in order to survive the G-force of their extraction from the ‘hustle’. But the hustle is far from my mind. I slope around, scramble some eggs, dress in my least urban attire, and take a step out into the fresh air and quiet.
It's a nothing day. I've heard about these.
It’s a funny thing to describe the rest of that day. I didn’t so much ‘do’ things as just let the things happen.
There was a fire pit, and we all know that fire pits have to be turned into the ‘biggest fire you can make’ (it’s the first rule of being a cub-scout). There’s a hammock, and hammocks of course must be strung up in the best possible spot for later star-gazing (it’s the first rule of being a ‘god-damn millennial snowflake’). So I putz about picking up good-looking sticks and auditioning trees for their sight-lines to the sky and huggability, occasionally breaking to spread peanut butter across a bagel and wandering back out into the green expanse.
For hours I stroll aimlessly about the vast woodland, through its passages, avenues and thickets. As long as I don’t head back towards the road we turned off last night, I could walk for hours in any other direction before I hit the next bit of tarmac underfoot. I investigate the source of the dog-barking I could hear from a distance and discover a field of restless pigs bumping, biting and charging each other. I climb a tree and dangle my feet from the highest branch I dare, wondering whether I would have been able to lord it like this a thousand years ago, maybe in this very same tree.
It’s a nothing day. I’ve heard about these.
Sure, the real world still cavorts around my head on occasion, but at a lower volume in the knowledge that I can’t possibly do anything about any of it until I leave this place. That distinction is powerful and necessary. I can’t do anything else. This is an enforced pause for a brain which has been running at a sprint for months-on-end. And so, slowly, over the course of the day’s nothingness, in the mindless wandering and instinctual wood-gathering and stick-stacking, a palpable serenity spreads through me.
I couldn’t have told you what time of day it was, only afternoon, evening, or night based purely on the arc of the sun. And by the time that last orange glow burnt itself out across the horizon, I had slowed to a standstill. Sat, legs outstretched towards a cracking fire, head lolling gently with the pace of my breath. When I lift my eyes from the flames, that great canopy of darkness steadily comes into focus, and bears itself; littered with infinite pinpricks of possibility, each idly awaiting their discovery or their demise. And not just the dots of the distant incandescent worlds but the wisps and swirls that inhabit the space between the specks where a-bajillion more exist. Wisps and swirls that I haven’t seen with a naked eye before, only in great long exposure photography from experts and their inter-stellar toys.
And I think this is where it happens for me.
In the loss of the cellular, wifi, rest-of-the-planet connection, there’s space for a connection of another kind. Richer, less demanding, less instant, but wholly more rewarding; a disconnection from the melee of thoughts, and a connection to my own quiet. The first time in years that I’ve been anywhere close to ataraxia.
I sleep like a log the final night, wake with the daylight, sit, nose pressed against the window and peer into the trees, the sky. Take just this last little moment to breathe…
It isn’t all that hard to be leaving because I know how soon I’ll be reunited with this place; for longer next time too. Sure, I have to face the noise and the speed and the maniacs again, but I’m doing so refreshed, reenergised, unfettered… unyoked.
It sticks with you. Once you experience it, or… scratch that. Maybe we’ve all experienced it already we just need reminding. Once you remind yourself this stillness is possible to achieve, and so close to home too—no flight, no tickets, no hotels—it feels close by. Like you can revisit any time you like. And I do, and I have. I’ve sat by that fire so many nights since. And I imagine I’ll sit by it a handful more times too before I break and I book for my second trip out to the wilderness.
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