There are few things as likely to make me anxious as going on holiday. This summer, for example, instead of looking forward to a week of swimming and fishing at the beach with my family, I was mostly thinking about the number of tweets I was going to have to catch up on afterwards, and how many unread items were likely to be waiting for me in my RSS reader when we got home. For as well as transporting me from the stresses and worries of my regular life, our holiday at the beach was also transporting me several hundred kilometres from my wireless internet facilities and my designated cellular data network.

“I have laid aside business, and gone a’fishing,” wrote Izaak Walton in his The compleat angler. Not that it was particularly difficult to lay aside business back in Walton’s day. He presumably didn’t have to agonise over an out of office message whenever he took some time out from his ironmongering shop ["crisp and informative, or chirpy, personable and possibly slightly smug with excitement?"]. The most that might be waiting at the end of a fishing expedition would be a handful of unpaid bills and a few mouldering copies of the London Gazette. He certainly didn’t have to worry, as he was out casting flies on the River Dove, that he might be missing out on a truly excellent photo of a startled, grammatically challenged household pet that he could have immediately posted to Twitter to awestruck accolade.

(As it turned out, I was able to access an alternative cellular data network on my lady partner’s smartphone — dispelling all my anxieties and allowing me to remain blissfully up-to-date, albeit at a roaming data tariff whose total remains worryingly unknown at the time of writing.)

As a result of all this, I’ve found myself wondering — as I’ve wondered in the past, though evidently to no avail — whether I should cut down on the number of RSS items and tweets and other internet detritus whose permission I give to wash themselves unceasingly upon my consciousness. Granted, some topics — publishing, technology, web development — I have a professional need about which to remain informed. Less obvious is the need to be alerted whenever the internet is graced with a new photo of a bulldog in a Victorian frock, or a civil union between a space robot and an earthling, or a man with a cat in his beard. Nevertheless, I continue to scrapbook the strangest and most compelling of these photos, as I do various bits of science news and weird history and vintage advertising posters, in the hope that someday they’ll come in handy.

This is a ‘just in case’ attitude, at a period in the development of the internet when there’s a more compelling case for a ‘just in time’ attitude. The sophistication of search engines and the efforts of professional and amateur digital curators make it increasingly possible to find items of interest when you need them. To make a fishing analogy, it’s the difference between taking a boat and a rod out onto an ocean you know is teeming with fish and seeing what shows up, and standing beneath a commercial fishing trawler as it empties tonnes of tuna, salmon and cod all over you.

It was during the holiday referenced at the opening of this increasingly circuitous article that I went out fishing with my inlaws, including a six year old nephew who had recently come of sufficient age to go out in the boat, and for whom this was his second fishing expedition. After an hour on the water, said nephew’s tally of fish totalled two, while mine remained fixed, seemingly permanently, at zero. (Not that I was troubled by this — reluctant as I am to follow through with the subsequent unhooking, blooding and gutting.) This disparity in the total of our respective catches was something upon which the nephew saw fit to remark, less with actual ill-feeling and more with the casual impudence of the very young.

An additional layer was added to my already substantial coating of general self-disappointment when I realised that a similar race to ‘catch something’ was behind my quest for constant internet updatedness — an infantile desire to be the first to post a link to something cool and new and interesting. As if, by relation, this would make me seem cool and interesting. As if copying a link from my RSS client and pasting it into Twitter with the possible intervention of a URL shortening service were some herculean labour for which I deserved to be thanked and lauded in the form of endless congratulatory retweets, complete with the credit that it was I who had unearthed this prize for the benefit of Twitterkind.

At the time of writing, there are still as many RSS subscriptions in my feed reader as when I set out on my holiday. I still feel the competitive desire to post links to Twitter faster than I can properly read the articles I’m linking to. And I’m still in the mindset of scarcity that compels me to hoard potentially useful URLs as though in preparation for some information apocalypse. But I’m doing my best to bear in mind something else Izaak Walton wrote in The compleat angler: “No man can lose what he never had.”

Admittedly, he was talking about trout, and there was no way he could have foreseen the traps and temptation of the universal resource locator, but still.