I’m certainly not the only scribbler who has a hankering for distraction-free modes. Mr Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, famously plugged up his laptop’s Ethernet port with superglue, claiming that no one with an internet connection could write proper fiction. Meanwhile, Mr Will Self, the author, journalist and political commentator, recommissioned his typewriter in 2004, citing digital noise as the stimulus. “It was becoming possible to find yourself seriously distracted by the to and fro between email, web surfing, buying reindeer-hide oven gloves you really didn’t need – or possibly even looking at films of people doing obscene things with reindeer-hide oven gloves,” Self wrote in his 2012 eulogy to the typewriter in The Times. It was written in response to the last company still manufacturing the machines ceasing production. It’s a statement that will chime with anyone whose mind has strayed down the YouTube rabbit hole after opening another Chrome tab.

Digital dominance has hot-wired us into a need for instant gratification, the sort that now brings us out in a cold sweat when we have to wait more than two minutes for a bus. Once, if you wanted to know what the capital of Turkmenistan was (Ashgabat), you had to take the encyclopaedia off the shelf. Now Google has made instant quizmasters of us all.

Analogue options offer delayed gratification in a world of immediate highs. “There’s a thrill of not knowing what you have taken until you develop it,” says Ms Harley Weir, a photographer who still uses film and has shot for British Vogue, Dazed and i-D. “It’s exciting.”

Weir also feels that the countless digital images we now take have robbed us of our sense of the unique, which goes some way to explaining the current resurgence of film. “When we were younger, all images were taken on film and they are sacred,” she says. “They’re so special. You only took one or two images because film was so precious. They have a one-of-a-kind nature. The idea of a jpeg is so depressing.”

Most significantly for Weir, film offers a tactile, tangible process that is key to the continued engagement with her work. “With digital photography, you just take an image,” she says. “But with film, you continue in the dark room and physically create an image with your hands. The physicality of it makes it meditative. It taps in to a natural part of a human need to do things physically. It’s a form of therapy.”

Even the simple act of reading a real book or magazine has become a form of mental decompression that addresses our need for the palpable. “Interacting with printed material is a physical process,” says Mr David McKendrick, former creative director of British Esquire and now editor of Paperboy magazine. “It’s almost the same as going for a swim or sitting in a sauna. It’s a rest for your brain, pressing pause for a moment – like having a beer after work.”

McKendrick, who is also a member of MR PORTER’s Style Council, launched Paperboy in 2021. A digital platform would have been the less risky option, but for McKendrick, it needed to be in print. “When you have a physical copy in your hands, it radiates,” he says. “You can feel the love. It’s printed on a traditional lithography machine – not digitally – so it smells the way it does due to the way the ink dries. Print is a multi-sensory experience.”

Analogue options are romantic in ways modern gadgets are not, especially if the gadget in question is badgering you to run faster or answer those unread emails. Our phones now have more of our biometric data on file than our doctors. This might explain the glut of old-school Motorola flip devices that are listed on eBay as people seek a simpler alternative to the digital bells and whistles that have made our lives more convoluted.

Mechanical watches exist solely to tell the time and that honesty, coupled with design nous, is part of their enduring appeal. “With analogue watches, you don’t have to charge them or prove anything to them,” says Mr George Bamford, founder of Bamford Watch Department. “They’re not recording your heart rate or steps. They just live on your wrist.”

In our hyper-digitised society, where significant decisions take place in hidden microprocessors and the algorithms of the metaverse, seeing a “living” object with exposed, animate parts also has a potent allure, in the same way that a hissing, puffing steam engine has a romance that a diesel-electric unit cannot match.

“With these watches, you can feel something happening,” says Bamford. “You see that hand going round, the moving cogs and springs. You hear their voice. They have a soul that a digital watch doesn’t.”

None of this means we are abandoning technology altogether, but there is a growing desire to step outside the digital world, if only for a brief spell. The mind-frazzling hours we spend slaving over a keyboard, which result in nothing physical to show for our efforts, appear to have nudged us towards more mindful, purposeful activities where the fruits of our labours are material and tangible, rather than digital. Traditional crafts, such as pottery, knitting and embroidery, have been gaining in popularity in recent years, a trend accelerated by the pandemic.

After the first lockdown, UK-based firm Hobbycraft reported a 200 per cent increase in trade, while department store John Lewis reported a spike, up almost 90 per cent, in yarn sales during the August 2020 heatwave. The latter could be partly attributed to Mr Tom Daley (the snap of the Team GB diver knitting a dog sweater poolside during last summer’s Olympics went viral), but as Daley proved, it wasn’t just grannies rekindling their dormant purling skills. Gen Zers, more used to applying nimble fingers to social media apps, were now wielding knitting needles and crochet hooks.

For Mr Jamie Chalmers, editor of modern cross-stitch magazine XStitch, this trend made sense at a time when mandatory isolation meant we were spending more time than ever in front of screens, which itself gave rise to the new phenomenon of Zoom fatigue. “The slowness and repetition of cross-stitch makes it extremely mindful,” he says. “You’re focusing your immediate attention on stitching, so it brings your mind back to centre. It decelerates your brain and reminds you that you’re a natural being. It’s like meditation without the bullshit.”

As someone who became a lockdown embroiderer, I found an end-of-day session of needlepoint, where my hands and head were engaged solely on working the coloured threads into a pattern, decluttered my frayed senses after a day of fielding endless emails and Zoom meetings. “Obtaining a sense of stillness from tangible activities is key,” says Chalmers. “Whether it’s cross-stitching, cooking or sport, it’s a tonic. For somebody who plays five-a-side football, it’s their way of being in the moment. You can’t think about your workload when you’re focused on getting a ball in the net.”

Whatever form it takes, a technical break sometimes feels necessary. Perhaps the root of the analogue renaissance is experiences and objects that make us feel human. I for one will continue to spin the rotary dial of my Bakelite telephone and clatter away happily on my Olympia Deluxe.

The author wrote the initial draft of this story on his 1950s Olympia Deluxe SM3 typewriter, before revising and emailing it on a MacBook Air