I think it was on the fourth day of our holiday that I realised it was time to stop looking at the internet. I had turned around in my seat in front of the computer to ask my boyfriend if he'd heard of a BBC weather forecaster named Tomasz Shafernaker. "Because apparently he was caught on camera flipping the bird to a newsreader! Look, there's a video of it!" The mouse cursor hovered over the 'play' button on the YouTube clip. Just as I moved to play the video, I thought of the two novels sitting by my bed, waiting to be read. I looked at the skies outside, beginning to brighten after two days of rain. I had a choice: I could watch this utterly pointless clip, or I could pull the plug on this machine and go outside. It's a decision that seems to get harder every summer.

If the addictive quality of the internet means that it can interrupt holidays, it stymies any serious effort to work, think or create. Even the greatest minds confess that they often find themselves struggling in the invisible snare of the world-wide web. In an interview with Time magazine this week, Jonathan Franzen described the extreme lengths he went to in order to cut himself off from virtual distraction while writing the follow-up to his 2001 bestseller, The Corrections.

He wrote every day in a hired office, a bare room containing just a table, chair and a basic laptop. But a room is never truly one's own if it's Wi-Fi-enabled. Franzen not only removed the wireless card from his Dell laptop but, just to be sure, permanently blocked its Ethernet port.

"What you have to do," he explained, "is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw the little head off it."

Not all of us need to forcibly disable our internet connections with glue and a hacksaw, partly because the world and his agent isn't waiting for us to produce a 1,000-page Great American Novel. And I don't compare my desire to relax in the sunshine and enjoy a holiday with a writer's desperate need for long-term solitude (Franzen's new book took nine years to complete, despite his precautions.) But lots of us will recognise the frustration his actions reveal.

The internet is a fascinating and liberating medium. You'd have to be a loon, or the now-disgraced Tomasz Shafernaker, to argue otherwise. But it does need to be switched off on occasion, perhaps more often than that, and we don't all have the self-discipline to do the disconnecting ourselves. I sometimes long for those childhood moments when, as I sat in front of the TV, a parent had entered the room, strode over to the box and pressed the 'off' button with a stern "That's enough."

drive from www.independent.co.uk