Haddenham Man Finds Cure For Depression

A man in Haddenham spent most of this decade in what he calls the roaring: forty browser tabs, a phone that buzzed at him in the dark, six strangers a day being wrong at him in a rectangle, and the permanent low hum of knowing everything about everywhere at once. His solution was not a retreat or an app. He has gone to live in 1997, which he keeps in the front room of a rented half a house off Station Road. He does not leave it much. He has written down the rules of the arrangement, typed and stapled, and he hands a copy to anyone who stands still, which the postman now budgets for.

The rules are simple. Nothing made after 1997 comes through the door. A box television plays the same six episodes of a sitcom about attractive Americans in a coffee shop, on a tape he describes the way other households describe an elderly relative. The internet is permitted, but only through a modem that screams for forty seconds and then delivers a photograph of a cat one line at a time, which he says is the correct speed for information to arrive at. Nobody can reach him instantly, and he says this is the whole treatment.

He is not angry at technology, and he would like that on the record before the paper does what the paper usually does. His position is that somewhere around the turn of the century the noise got into the plumbing, and that the rest of us signed for it without reading the form.

So music is policed at the door, on the grounds that it was the last thing anyone had to earn. Nothing is played in the house unless somebody standing in the house can say out loud what key it is in. This has taken his record collection down to nine albums, all of which he can hum, and he regards the loss as the entire point. A man with a guitar who understood what he was doing with it. A woman with a flute who had plainly spent a winter on scales. He says it like a man reading out the names of the fallen.

The roaring went in about a fortnight, he says. He sleeps through the night. He has four opinions, he can name all four, and he does, twice, with the second run-through delivered slightly slower in case the paper missed any of it.

"I know what happened in the world up to roughly March, and I am at peace with everything after it," he said on the doorstep, holding a mug. "A chap at the village bakery started telling me about an event and I put my hands over my ears like a boy of nine, and he respected that." Asked what he will do when the tape finally goes, he studied the hedge for a bit and said there was a second tape, that there had always been a second tape, and that the question itself was roughly how all this started.