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LIZ JONES: Last week was SO bad I'm taking the ultimate step - going offline

Published: 19:51 EST, 27 June 2015 | Updated: 09:17 EST, 28 June 2015

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Most spend half our lives in search of an internet connection

In the summer of 2000 I was on holiday in Jamaica, staying in Ian Fleming’s villa, Goldeneye.

It was the middle of the night, and I was in a rage because I couldn’t find a phone socket to connect to the internet, which meant I couldn’t file my copy.

In those days, you had to take a phone lead, and a different phone socket converter for every country (the socket for Milan was so huge it meant packing one less pair of shoes), before dialling up the internet.

I was crawling around the villa using a torch, as I didn’t want to wake my boyfriend. It wasn’t long before an armed security guard turned up, convinced I was being burgled. Which in a way I was: of my holiday and my sanity and my relationship.

My life since then has been one long, frantic quest for internet connection. In the foothills of the Himalayas, on a small island off Mozambique, in refugee camps in Haiti and on the border of Somalia, in a village in Bangladesh, in an earthquake zone in Pakistan, in a tent in Glastonbury.

I even had my phone screen held above my eyes when I came round from a general anaesthetic, just in case some awful tragedy had occurred while I was under.

I filed copy from my honeymoon, and even got my husband to read me the news headlines after undergoing laser eye surgery because I was wearing a metal grill over my eyes for 24 hours. My only respite was when on board a plane. This in turn made me phobic about air travel: not the flying or crashing part, but the safe landing, when I would switch on my smartphone and all manner of worrying emails would pop into the inbox.

Now even that brief holiday from being invited to ‘Plan your funeral’ or ‘Your Barclaycard statement is now ready’ or ‘VAT to the quarter ending’ no longer exists, as you can use the internet on the plane. I have my smartphone and iPad with me everywhere – in the bath, horse riding, in bed, at my mum’s funeral – and it has become a ticking bomb of stress in my pocket when yet another email pops up that says, ‘Are you OK? Have you read….’ and so I log on to some hateful remark, or read of some dreadful atrocity somewhere in the world.

Even at a retreat in Kerala (another assignment; these trips are never holidays), my internet went down, so I lost my mantra, which led to me screaming down the land line to reception.

In Rome, my laptop died, which meant a €70 taxi ride to a shopping mall, and the emergency purchase of a new MacBook Pro that turned out to have a keyboard and all the instructions for Word in Italian.

This gave me a crash course in Salvare and Visualizza and Inserisci during my round-the-world trip in the steps of Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love. She found serenity, I found a complete meltdown.

(I later learned the hotel cleaner had vacuumed over my power cable, so I could have just purchased a new lead.)

The walls of the Villa Stephanie’s rooms have a special coating that blocks 96 per cent of wi-fi signals. Above, one of the spas at the Brenners Park Hotel & Spa which launched it

A few months ago I received an email from my friend Meena, then living in New York. She was inviting me to a ‘Digital Detox’ she was hosting at the W hotel, where guests ‘sit on the terrace and drink calming cocktails, have to switch their phones off and actually talk to each other!’ At the time I thought, how daft: people have to go to a trendy hotel in order to have their smartphone wrestled from their buffed fingers.

Today, though, having just had the worst week of my life, with a digital death threat, with terrible, terrible news reaching me by email that meant I was about to lose everything I’ve worked for over 32 years, and also a deafening digital silence from someone that meant our relationship was over, I yearn for a few moments’ respite from the internet, which is why I've already requested a press trip to the luxury hotel in Germany that has a kill switch for guests.

The walls of the Villa Stephanie’s rooms have a special coating that blocks 96 per cent of wi-fi signals. It’s a spa – of course it’s a spa: a place where ghastly people like me could once escape our lives.

But perhaps, for the first time in 15 years, I might be able to wake up in the morning without the awful, sickening little harbinger of doom nesting ominously on my bedside table.