I must apologise that this blog comes two days late, as I have been holed up in a farmhouse in deepest Dartmoor over the last few days, writes Atticus. Wifi, phone and mobile reception free, this ancient granite farmhouse didn't look in any hurry to join in on the ongoing communications revolution. It's fair enough, though: its very charm is that it's an ancient granite farmhouse stuck on a remote hillside – it would be a bit like putting cable TV in a monk's cell.

Even so, the whole raison d'être of the place as a holiday destination seems to have passed the previous holiday occupants by. In the visitor's book they requested "A bigger TV in the sitting room, please," despite the fact that the current television is already a whopper and there are fifty miles of beautiful countryside to explore from the front door. When we left, we managed to retaliate, asking in the visitor's book that the owners "please do not change the TV." We also asked them to refer their cat to a pet psychologist for various self-esteem issues, but that's another story.

The lack of communications access, despite meaning that I couldn't blog, did give me pause for thought. After the nail biting and gnashing of teeth subsided – "I email, therefore I am" – I began to enjoy being out of touch. Worries began to drop off me on the moors, and I had that oh so rare moment in our overloaded times: a sense of solitude. It's been so long since I had a feeling like that (after all, when you carry a mobile phone, there's always the latent possibility that it will begin ringing, or that you can ring and speak to someone within ten seconds, which kind of hampers the nourishment of a sense of being alone) that it took me a while to understand what it was. When I stopped panicking, it felt pretty good.

Thinking back over the last ten years, with the rise of connectedness through mobile phones and the internet, I do think we have lost something. Now, every moment and movement we take can be captured. We can notify all and sundry about where we are, what we're doing and what we think of it. Of course it is possible to fight it, but we must be aware that the default position is changing all the time. How many millions of us originally said,  "I'm just going to use my mobile phone for emergencies"?

Unfortunately, no news is no longer good news. I just wish it were.