Blogelstein!

On my new phone

Confession: I have lost three mobiles this year. The third one went in Heathrow when I was en route to Holland, and that was it: having exhausted my stock of old phones, my free upgrades, my flatmate’s good humour (in the spring he gave me a splendid one that he’d designed himself; it fell out of my pocket when I was cycling and got run over by a car) and my insurance entitlement, I realised I was just going to have to straight-up buy a phone. Buy a phone. Who does that? I’ve never heard of anyone buying a phone.

Anyway, I obviously got the cheapest model possible. It is a £10 Nokia and it looks like every bit of its £10: the plastic is cheap and light and a horrible brown colour that I assume is due to some kind of factory mistake. The technology is straight out of 1997, or at least I think it is, because I never owned a mobile before 2003. The ring tones are not even polyphonic. The font is awful. There’s no way to check my emails. It has no camera, which means that when I next encounter a marginal celebrity or hilariously mis-spelled street sign, I will not be able to post photographs of it on the internet. It is a horrible phone.

But do you know what is even more horrible? The acquisition of this ghastly little piece of technology has made me realise that somehow I have become the kind of person who cares about what kind of phone I have. UGH. And in that respect, I’m rather glad that I have foisted it upon myself. It seems an apt punishment.

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But I also must note that my crap new phone does have an unexpected little benefit: the talking alarm clock. I have never encountered one before – I assume they must have been very cutting-edge in 1997 – but this one sounds exactly like my mother did in precisely that era. ‘Time to get up,’ the phone says. ‘It’s 7 o’clock.’ It is rather sweet and heartwarming to hear that familiar, gentle prod, and this morning it caused me to have a very vivid dream that I was confessing to my parents that I hadn’t been attending my calculus class for weeks and was thus going to flunk the exam and not going to graduate from high school. My dream parents were surprisingly sympathetic.