Why the women in my walking group have stopped taking their phones out of their pockets this autumn

I should say at the start that I am not a creative person. I was a practice manager for thirty years, I have never owned a camera that wasn't also a phone, and if you'd told me in March that I'd be writing something like this I'd have laughed at you. But here we are, and the women in my walking group made me promise.

Here's where I was. The last of ours left home two years ago. I'd done the thing you're supposed to do: got properly into the garden, joined the Tuesday walking group, bought the good boots. And it worked, for a while. Then it just sort of stopped working. The walks were still lovely. I just didn't feel them. I'd get home and realise I'd spent forty minutes of a two-hour walk looking at a screen, checking something that didn't need checking, taking the four hundredth photo of the same view.

I didn't tell anyone that. You don't, do you. But I think a lot of us were in the same place.

Susie, and the thing in her coat pocket

Susie is the one in our group everyone slightly wants to be. She worked in films for thirty years, moved out here a decade ago, and still has that thing where she notices the light. We were at the top of the long field in the first week of September and I asked her, half joking, how she stayed so interested in it all.

She said the trick is you have to keep looking properly, and the phone makes that nearly impossible. And then she pulled a small film camera out of her coat pocket. A real one. With a roll of film in it. She said once a month she does one walk with just the dog and the camera, phone in the car, and she doesn't come home until she's used all 24 frames.

I said my camera roll had thousands of photos of these fields. She asked when I'd last looked at any of them. I didn't have an answer.

What I thought the problem was going to be

Film. The developing. I live forty minutes from the nearest town that might, possibly, still have somewhere that does it, and I wasn't going to start driving there with a roll of film like it's 1994.

This is the bit that made it possible, so pay attention if you're rural like me. Susie's camera is from a small company called CATCH, in London. The film comes to you in the post. When a roll's finished, you put it in a prepaid envelope they give you and drop it in any postbox, the one at the end of the lane will do. They develop it by hand in their studio in Shoreditch and email you the scans about a week later. You never go to a shop. You never touch a chemical. The whole thing is postbox-shaped.

The first walk, honestly

Awful. I felt like a fraud. I took the first eight photos in about ten minutes of things that didn't deserve it, then got precious and took nothing for an hour. Phone in the glovebox, as instructed, and I reached for it in my pocket probably thirty times. Came home with four frames left and posted the roll off feeling a bit silly.

The scans arrived the next Thursday. Most of them were nothing special. Three of them were the best photographs I've ever taken, and I mean that. A gate. The dog's ears. My own feet on the wet path. I printed one for the kitchen. My daughter asked who took it.

The lane.

The cottage and the Land Rover.

The tree I walk past every day and had never looked at.

Roll one. Twenty-one duds and these three.

What changed by month three

Something about the click. Susie had said it and I'd nodded politely, but it's true. The sound of a real shutter in a quiet wood scratches an itch I didn't know I had. By the third roll I wasn't reaching for the phone. I was looking at the hedge properly, deciding whether it was worth one of my 24, and mostly deciding it wasn't, which is its own kind of attention.

I came home calmer. Not in a wellness way. In the way you feel after a swim.

And here's the bit I'm slightly embarrassed to admit: it made me the interesting one for once. The rest of the group all have the same phone and the same photos. I turned up with a little film camera and a story about why, and suddenly I'm the one being asked things. There's less pressure, too. When the only ones watching you take a photo are the dog and a pheasant, you stop worrying about whether it's any good.

We call them CATCH Walks now

Susie started it, I was second, and there are now nine of us doing it. First Tuesday of the month: phones in the cars, dogs on leads, one camera each. Nobody talks much for the first mile. Then the scans come back a week later and the group chat, which is ironic, goes mad.

Three rolls arrive in the post every 90 days, which is one a month, which is exactly right. Twelve walks a year. By next September I'll have a year of this valley in a box, and not one of the photos will be of a screen.

The Tuesday group, single file, nobody on a phone.

The dark bit of the wood. The flash did the rest.

roda. The autumn and winter film. ISO 400, made for low light.

Anyway. That's the story. It's a small thing. But I'd gone a bit flat, and I'm not any more, and it cost thirty pounds a month and a walk I was doing anyway. If you're where I was in March, I'd give it a go before the light goes. Susie says to tell you the free camera offer isn't always on.

Jane, Tuesday walking group, somewhere in the Dales. The dog is called Nell.
Every photo in this piece was taken by Jane on her own CATCH camera.