What Elon gets wrong about England

When work follows you everywhere, how do you switch off? You can, if you wish, hide from your emails by spending £500 a night on a remote luxury retreat for the digitally frazzled in the Canaries, complete with designer bed linen and no phone signal. But those in the know take their holidays from the internet closer to home: camping on Britain’s eastern coastline. If you know where to go (no, I’m not telling you) you can find bucolic rural surroundings, sandy beaches, honesty-box raspberries and such superbly bad network coverage that doomscrolling just isn’t an option. It’s often struck me that camping life of this kind is perhaps the Platonic form of a certain type of postwar English sociality. Amenities are frugal, but pleasantly so. You have neighbors, but not too close. (It’s an unwri