Mobile incident 1: I spent most of the weekend with my parents in deepest Norfolk. You might have thought that Norfolk was part of the modern civilised world, but apparently not. There is no mobile phone reception where my parents live, not a bar, not a flicker. It's like living back in 1995. You can't send text messages, you can't check your voicemail and you can't download the latest Premiership goals. On the positive side, nobody in the village walks around with a phone clutched to their ear, nobody's brain is being fried by living too close to a phone mast and you're more likely to hear a real croak than that annoying Crazy Frog ringtone. It's all quite refreshing really. And there's always that solid 20th century phenomenon, the ordinary telephone, which used to be a perfectly acceptable means of keeping in touch. Being signal-deprived for two days didn't bother me at all, but I suspect a large proportion of the UK population would have been suffering twitchy withdrawal symptoms within hours.
Mobile incident 2: On the train home from Norfolk there was rather too much mobile reception. A bald bloke in a belly-hugging suit conducted international business from the middle of a field just outside Ipswich. Two lads in front of me spent the entire journey accessing the huge multimedia archive stored on each other's phone, mostly miniature music videos featuring scantily clad females warbling in foreign. I hate to think how much it must have cost them to download that much material, legitimately at least. But it was when the pink-coated mid-70s granny sitting in the seat opposite suddenly whipped out her handset to give her granddaughter a call that I decided maybe mobile phone penetration had reached epidemic proportions. Can people not make a simple journey any more without getting uncontrollably lonely and generating unnecessary profit for mobile phone companies? Is nobody immune?
Mobile incident 3: Three seconds after leaving my house to go to work yesterday morning I realised I'd left my mobile indoors. I could have gone back inside to collect it, it would have delayed me by no more than 15 seconds, but I decided not to bother. Spending the day handset-free was no big deal. My mobile rings so infrequently that I'm not usually alert enough to notice even when it eventually does. I don't spend my days in the office engaging in surreptitious ping pong SMS chats at 10p a line. When I want to take a photograph I prefer to use a real camera over whose images I have complete ownership and control. And if somebody really had wanted to get in touch with me urgently yesterday, well, there was a real phone on my desk. When I got back home umpteen hours later I was proved right - there were no messages, no missed calls, nothing, from nobody, as usual. I can live without my mobile. Can you?
(This whole post is just an excuse for me to try out a new 'free' web poll service. Please click and vote. Poll closes 0700 tomorrow.)
(Or, if you're a true mobile addict, please text 'MUG' to 88167 [votes cost 25p plus usual network charges]
