I had a lot of emails from readers delighted that we selected Stephen Fry — national treasure, uber gadget geek and iPhone fan — to receive the SMS Text News flowers. One or two from sunnier climes wondered who he was so I asked Ben Harvey to give us an overview in place of his normal weekly viewpoint.

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“Writer and Broadcaster”. Three little words, a title that can excuse an entire, vast, slippery life-history of bastardness. People have long railed at this country’s Celebrity Culture, the fact that fame seems to make the everyday activities (“Posh in crockery-shopping shocker!” or “Jordan brushes teeth: exclusive!”) worthy of media coverage. Something a little more insidious, a little more worrying, though, is that fame can make everyday opinions worthy of media coverage.

And so we are all exposed – at various times, and at various levels – to the banal whitterings of celebrity columnists. Prejudice dressed-up as journalism is nothing new, and in fact a little of it can be a good thing; to get the nation’s moral sap to rise takes a little manipulation and a little tweaking, but it gives us all a good, cathartic workout if we’re spurred into righteous anger every now and then, if only because humans seem to like being angry so very much. The one thing, though, that is never good, that is never excusable, is when someone famous craps out an article where the facts have been scraped together to support a dodgy premise, because it’s then that stupidity & desperate, bullshit facts start to form the bulk of the piece read by millions of commuters or lunching office-workers.

Who, being bovine in nature, are highly impressionable.

It’s a good job indeed that humans subconsciously love getting angry because I have to admit that the mere thought of this has got me fuming, rather. It’s the arrogance of a newspaper columnist tapping away, pontificating out to the world as if they really actually knew what they were talking about. You don’t get this sort of behaviour in the rest of the world; if you went to your doctor and he whined on about the UK’s excessive number of CCTV cameras then you’d get him struck off faster than if he’d whacked off. If a waiter bitched at you for five-hundred words on why single-mothers need more help from the State in the form of nationalised childcare then the only tip you’d leave him would be “don’t eat the yellow snow”. Thank goodness taxi-drivers never mouth-off about things they know nothing about. God! Just imagine…

The one good thing – in fact, possibly the only good thing – about almost all celebrity columnists being tosspots, arseholes or bullshit-artists is that it highlights, with blinding, massive clarity, the fact that there are a few out there who do know what they’re talking about. And there, at the very top of this unfortunately small tree, sits The Fry.

I don’t call him “Stephen Fry” anymore, and haven’t, for a couple of years now. There are simply no other Stephens that matter. There are no other Frys that matter, either, so why bother with the surplus data of a proper name? Also, it further goes to forcibly confirm the man as an integral piece of our national life, as The Fry is now akin to The Tube or The Beatles or The Dole in the fabric that makes up The Country. People have often labelled him with the title of “national treasure”, but he’s rather more than that; Hampton Court Palace is a national treasure. HMS Victory is a national treasure. The Crown Jewels are – quite literally – a national treasure, but when did a house, a boat, or a bunch of shiny rocks make you laugh so hard that, to absorb the wee, you were forced to stuff sanitary-towels down your trousers?

The fact that the flower-fairy of SMS Text News has sent The Fry a bouquet this week made me try and think why he deserves such a tribute from us, and this bought to me my first memory of him; as far as my booze-rotted brain can be trusted I think it was an episode of The Young Ones, when he was on University Challenge and Vivian dropped a grenade on him. This caused my nine-year-old self to howl with laughter until I went a colour that Dulux would probably describe as Smurf Blue, and did more, in my eyes, to earn him those flowers than any number of gaspingly well-written blogs on technology.

Further confirming his worthiness, in terms of blessing the man with orchids, is the dawning realisation that for the past twenty years – through different fashions, different governments, recession, terrorism, war and Noel Edmonds – he’s been consistently nothing less than a solid-gold genius. The talents of the chap – from playing barking-mad Melchett in Blackadder to forming the finest anagram ever known to man (Virginia Bottomley = I’m an Evil Tory Bigot [“…a good pun is its own reword…”]) – are legion and uniformly flawless.

As is his knowledge flawless. The Fry has become a byword for total, comprehensive education in all spheres of the world, as anyone who’s ever watched QI will be able to tell you. And this now – finally – harks back to me being furious about those that mouth-off without knowing anything; this man is the antidote to all of that. The cure. Is he, thinking about it, the most trustworthy person in all the world? (As the song-lyric goes – thou shalt not question Stephen Fry). And yet the same man can then go and star in a fairly edgy, modern action film like V is For Vendetta! Were I not so permanently impressed I imagine I’d be permanently jealous. So there we have it; more reasons than you can shake a stick at to argue the case for the bouquet.

Anyway – I’ll stop telling you things you already knew and leave you with the petulant demand that you immediately go and read his blog on cellular geekery, if only because it’s as up-to-date as it is funny. One word of warning, though; don’t have your mobile in your pocket when you do, if only because hot, pulsing squirts of giggle-induced wee (plus the occasional crackle of sanitary-towel static, if you’re me) may well void your handset-insurance…

So, the calendar ticks over once again. It’s strange how it seems that, the older you get, the faster the years spin past – some people put this down the effects of age on the brain, or because, as an adult, you have more to distract you, but I think it’s just because the one single thing that really, really used to drum it into you that another year has passed (i.e., the spending of January apologising to people for writing the wrong year on your cheques) isn’t possible to do anymore, cheques having gone the way of the dodo, the way of the mammoth, indeed, the way of the very economy itself.

A New Year is a delicious thing. Unsullied, perfect, holding the same promise as a fresh diary or a fresh relationship or a fresh packet of cigarettes. Or, at least, it does from the 3rd of January onwards, the 1st and 2nd days of the month always being a dimly-remembered fug of alcohol-poisoning & general emotional hangover. Once your kidneys have purged the booze from your blood, however, it’s time to get your teeth into the new year like a starving dog tears into a steak. Last year was a bloody awful year, and as such this year will be ravaged, pumped for all its worth. And I intend to conduct myself in 2008 with all the discrete dignity, class, sophistication & gracious restraint of Britney Spears getting into a car without any pants on.

As with all the important things in life, it is important to have a plan, to have structure when approaching a new year. This is why resolutions are always so popular – they give a framework, a skeleton to your fate, and it’s rather easier to fill the gaps in once you have the broad aims in place first. Resolutions are also popular for rather more specific reasons, especially if you hold shares in David Lloyd or Nicorette Inc. Personally I view them with mixed feelings – I love them because they highlight the enormously delicious juxtapositions of human emotion (joining a gym, forgetting to go, eating lots of pies and then sobbing, because you’re a bloater, the whole process neatly encapsulating the entire remit of both hope & despair) and also because, even though they’re naturally rather faddish, they are useful in getting your aims for the year down, so you at least have something to shoot for.

Resolution number one – I will not text girls when I’m drunk. Oh, god. Oh, sweet heaven, this one screwed me over last year. You know that feeling you get when you wake up and remember something monstrously shameful you did the night before…? The Germans probably have a word for it (a language that can come up with “schadenfreude”, after all, can’t be lacking in a little creativity. “Tottyharrasenenshitfaycen”, perhaps) but I’m sure you know what I mean. You groggily grasp your mobile with tequila-stained fingers and moan gently with horror as you check your sent items. Saccharine expressions of love seem to be my specialist-subject, here, often using language so flowery that the recipient keels over with terminal hay-fever. Bad poetry, declarations of complete & heavenly devotion and general soppy shit is all par for the course here, and neatly torpedoed a couple of budding relationships in 2007.

Amusingly, there is an optional-extra you can have fitted to your cars’ ignition-system, which is a breathalyser. You have to puff into it before turning the key, and if you’re over the limit then, quite simply, your car won’t start. And all I can think of is how bulky this kit is, and whether or not it could be grafted onto the side of my phone.

Resolution number two – Only screen the calls you really need to. I admit this, knowing that I’m likely to be pilloried by many, many people as either being a passive-aggressive snob or as being an anti-social little retard. But I screen my calls quite a lot. 0800 numbers get binned without a second’s thought, and those marked as WITHHELD usually get fobbed-off to voicemail (“This is Ben Harvey’s mailbox. Any message you leave me will be thoughtlessly deleted. Have a nice day!”), and that’s fair enough, I think, in this world of idiot telemarketing, but I hereby resolve to always answer my phone, even if I can’t be arsed. Unless I’m out running. Or in the bath. Or asleep. Or cooking. Or where the background-noise of the pub would ruin the otherwise-perfect lie I wove as an excuse to get out of something boring (like, say, going to work).

I may need to give this one a little more thought.

Resolution number three – don’t lose the bloody thing. I have some pretty peculiar genetic gifts, if you don’t mind me saying so. They’re not particularly useful, mind, so it’s not like I can count cards like Rain Main, or work out Pi to its last digit, but my talents to come in uniquely useful. I have two such natural blessings; the first is an inability to get totally drunk. I drink and drink and drink and then, whilst my friends are finding a nice, comfy gutter to go and sleep in, some part of my unconscious mind takes over and guides me neatly home. This is good for me, because I never wake up in police cells, but bad for me, because I’m always the one my friends call for bail-money when they do (see the section on me screening calls, above).

The second non-superpower I have is an inability to lose phones. It’s not up there with the power of flight, or x-ray vision, or being faster than a speeding bullet (that phrase always confused me, as a child – what other sorts of bullets are there…?), but again, it is something that comes in handy. I always know where my handset is. I’m more likely to walk out of the house without my trousers on than without my mobile. I dropped one in the mud at Glastonbury one year and still found it, even though it was covered in chips. So why resolve to not lose it, when I’m in no danger of losing it?

Well, simple – I’ve just boasted about not ever losing phones, so what do you think I’m two or three days away from getting mugged off me…happy new year!

I’m writing this in the embarrassing little gap between Christmas and New Year. Somebody once described this week-long period as being “the armpit of the year”, but I, personally, prefer to call it the barse, because it’s like that embarrassing little gap between your balls and your arse, simply because it holds no useful or obvious value whatsoever. There’s nothing to do. All of the good TV seems to be on before 3pm, which, given that I tend to rise 4 or 5 means that the only entertainment I’m left with is a slightly random DVD that someone gave me. And please believe me when I tell you that there’s only so many times you can watch the black & white masterpiece of Pierrepoint: Britain’s Last Hangman before the festive spirit leaves you entirely.

This time of year is usually filled with three things; ruminating over the year just gone, or plotting schemes for the year to come, or, my personal favourite, just going to lots of parties and getting a bit smashed. It’s a good time for drinking, given that people are in the mood to let their hair down, and because there’s far more booze around than normal, and also because this week of the year has a strange, confusing effect on peoples’ memories. I put this epidemic of forgetfulness down to the same sort of end-of-year effect that happens with budgets, in that often companies & governments are too busy trying to spend every last penny of their yearly allocation before the calendar ticks over, and therefore aren’t actually too picky about where it goes. The practical upshot of this, for me, is that, once a party is in sufficient swing, I can get naked whilst playing Twister and yet nobody seems to remember anything about it. Least of all me.

Or this amnesia might be due to someone just putting rohypnol in the punch. Who knows. Either way, getting drunk at parties certainly helps the one tradition that I’m sure we all dread, to various extents – which is being button-holed by someone that wants some advice about mobile phones.

Doctors always complain about this. Doctors always, always whinge about the fact that they get collared at any & every social event by people they vaguely know who want to tell them, over a drink, every little thing about their barse-pox, if only because parties have more twiglets & olives than the average common-or-garden waiting-room, and are therefore more attractive a choice of venue for such a conversation than their local GUM clinic (actually, mine does have olives, but only black ones, which I despise). But, then again, doctors get paid six figures a year (that’s a whole seven figures more than me, by the way) and as such their bleatings can be safely ignored. What you cannot ignore, alas, is the way that this disease has moved on, in the last few years, to infect anyone who has more of a clue than most about mobiles.

We’ve all been there. You’re at a do, having a drink, meeting new people, and someone you’re talking to picks up on the fact that, when it comes to mobiles, you know what you’re talking about. “Aaaah,” they’ll say. “Aaaah, that’s funny, I was just thinking about buying an iPhone / changing networks / setting a handset battery on fire and then sitting on it. Do you think that’s a good idea?”.

And they’ll look up at you, as if they’re expecting you to be glad about the fact that they’ve been magnanimous & thoughtful enough to let you bless them with your knowledge. The graceless berks! You’re at a party! You’re at a social event! You don’t want to spend the precious five minutes between you turning up & you stripping off to play Twister eroded by banal & pointless questions about which fecking website it’s best to buy handsets from. If you’re an expert about industrial carpeting, you don’t have people at a drinks-do waddle up to you and say “Aaaah, I’ve been thinking about getting a new carpet, but does Lux-Pile Ltd. get better coverage where I live than WeaveCo, Inc.?”. And anyway, if they did do that then you would be perfectly justified in smashing a bottle on a table-top and then flensing their wind-pipe out of their neck like a fleshy bit of calamari. In fact, there isn’t a court in the land that would convict you. So what is it that makes such boring behaviour socially valid when it comes to telephones…?

Tsk. My usual tactic in such situations is just to say, with rather forced bonhomie, “Well, just don’t by an LG, they might just blow up!” which gives me an opportunity to give them a short coroner’s report of that poor Korean chap that got his ribcage caved in when his phone went pop, all of which, if done with sufficient gore, will make them go away to be quietly sick in the corner, thus leaving me in peace. The grim and maddening irony of all of this is that the best bloody party of 2007 that I went to was deliberately, purely, wonderfully dedicated to nothing but people who wanted to talk about the mobile industry, and that was the SMS Text News drinks-bash in London. I was sick in the corner that night myself, but only out of overpowering envy at some of the kit that was being bandied about.

Anyway. I would give you one or two more tips about how to deflect such irritants over the holiday season (“Ah, I’m a bit behind, they wouldn’t let us have mobile phones in prison, see” being another favourite of mine), but alas, I’m fresh out of time – my ferry back to the mainland leaves in…
Oh dear. It really does leave very soon. And I must, must catch it, because my signal here alternates - depending on factors such as barometric pressure, and the number of seagulls in the sky – between Vodafone IE and Vodafone UK and it’s doing my nut in. Civilisation beckons. And I believe there is a saying about time, tide or bastard ferry-captain waiting for no man, so I must be leaving.

Happy new year, boys and girls.

Aaaaaah…Christmas. Time of too much food, too much booze, and, if you’re as clueless as me when it comes to chemistry, too much throwing-up as you try to settle your poor, bloated tummy with ten rennies washed down with vinegar. Christmas revolves around three things, traditionally – gluttony, watching television and touching base with family.

And it’s the family-thing that’s got me in my current mess.

I write this, dear reader, not ensconced in the comfort & stability of my usual kicking ground (the south of England) but instead from my dad’s house, which is uncomfortable, unstable and perched rather precariously a few feet from the raging, black torrents of the Atlantic Ocean, on an island off of the West Coast of Scotland.

The thing is, you see, I don’t really get to see the dear old buffer that often, and so it tends to be the case that either me or my brother will wander up and keep him company for Christmas. This year it was my turn to make the 650-mile trek, and so although filled with the smug warmth of a duty honourably executed I am also frozen by the local temperature, which would be quite warm, were it not for the wind-chill, which is such that if you look directly into the wind your eyes will ice-over, cracking and shrinking until they become the same size & texture of those little baubles of bubble-gum they used to put at the bottom of screwball ice-cream cones. You know the ones I mean; the most delicious way to choke to death, as a child…

Anyway, I’ve been on the island for all of 20 hours, now, which is actually a little less time than it takes to get here. The most amusing leg of the trip is the National Express link to the ferry port, a strange and humbling experience that always feels like entering some foreign country. In fact, it’s exactly like a foreign country – the toilets are awful, the customs & morals are at odds with your own and everyone’s speaking a language you can’t understand (I counted Spanish, Polish and, most unintelligible of all, Glaswegian).

One thing that did make me giggle, though, was a little transfer stuck to the window that encouraged passengers to SMS their comments about the trip into a shortcode. However, a couple of hours down the road - jinking around a loch - when I was about to punt off a text critiquing the driver’s body-odour, this giggle rapidly dried into a rolling gurgle of shock when the three most horrid, damning & generally disastrous words that the world has ever thrown at me plopped onto my screen. And, oh, they were bad words. More frightening that “you’re fired, Harvey”. More anguishing than “I’m leaving you”. More generally life-changing than “I love you” and more intrinsically mind-shaking than “Pregnant. Triplets. Yours.” And those three fell words were:

NO NETWORK COVERAGE.

My heart responded to the facts of the matter quicker than my brain did, by ramping up my BPMs to about 120 and generally laying down a lot of blood-oxygen to see me through this dire, unspeakable trauma. My adrenal glands were next to cotton-on, squirting out liquid-panic from my kidneys in the same sort of quantities, in terms of fluid-ounceage, as your average Slag & Legless happy-hour cocktail-bucket. This flight-or-fight response would normally come in inordinately useful, were it not for the fact that I was currently penned into a coach-seat that Tom Cruise would’ve had trouble squeezing himself into (legend has it that, in order to fit more passengers on busses, National Express tracked down that serial-killer who crammed all of his corpses into suitcases and promptly hired him as vice-president in charge of revenue).

So I’m sat there going just a little nuts. You expect to lose coverage on two occasions, and two occasions only – when you’re underground, or when you’re in a plane. For it to happen unexpectedly is…well. Unexpected. For it to happen when you’re a self-confessed phonaphilliac like me is hideously jarring, doubly so when you’re being boiled alive by the furnace-like heaters in a wheeled sardine-can, and you really, really need to text a mate to get advice on how to deal with the fact that you appear to be sat next to the Crack Fox from the Mighty Boosh.

So that was fun. It only lasted ten minutes or so, and the relief that returned as the signal-bars did was delicious in itself, but now, alas, it’s a permanent state of affairs. Or, rather, near-permanent. The island I’m on, you see, has coverage – like my winter beard – best described as “patchy”. And the fishing-village where my dad’s retired up to is in a dip, the same granite cove that protects it from the rage of the sea doing a similarly good job at protecting it from the modern inconvenience of functioning mobiles.

So my poor little phone is just sat here, forlornly, like a puppet with its strings cut. The fact that circumstance & distance has reduced this little jewel of modern technology to nothing more than a paperweight is almost absurd – the reason it’s not totally, utterly, complete absurd is because, in a fiendishly cruel twist of fate, the signal here does, about twice a day, get through. And all of a sudden I can inhale communication & correspondence like a drowning swimmer inhales air; it’s not what you need, and it’s not enough to keep you going, but you’re not exactly going to turn it down, either.

Why the signal is so frustratingly fickle I have no idea. Twice-daily slots of coverage would logically be connected to the tides – do radio-waves bounce off water…? – but the timings keep changing. Perhaps it’s a combination of water and cloud, skipping just enough wattage out to me to function. Maybe it’s nothing to do with the weather, and in fact is more to do with one of the implausibly hairy cattle over here getting frisky with a cell-tower. My attempts to logically deduce the exact reasons for my tenuous links out to the rest of you have been just a little bit hampered by the extra fact that this island is, quite literally, the whisky-producing capital of the world. And since the one thing I like doing more than talking is drinking, I just hope that all you charming & wondrous people have a Christmas even half as merry as mine has been so far.

Happy Christmas, everyone. You’re my bhest friendsh!

Somebody once said that there are three types of people in this world: those that can count, and those that can’t. I disagree – there are only two types of people; people that are good with money, and people like me, who are comically hopeless.

It’s a disease I’ve had my whole life and it’s a disease that will probably kill me, or, rather, would probably kill me, if I could afford a funeral, or indeed the coroner needed to declare me dead (properly dead, mind, not just lurking in Panama for the insurance). It’s a mental thing; everyone alive has a slight blind-spot in their heads, the thing being that you can’t see your own one, and can only snigger at other peoples’, be it the fact they actually hold their drink or their self-deluding belief that they can sing. I’m the same, except that instead of being oblivious to my karaoke-attempts boiling the bladders of everyone within earshot I actually live in a fantasy dream-world where the ebbs & flows of cash into & out of my various accounts won’t, at the end of the month, result in a net figure that looks like the sort of number physicists use to measure the most underfed & tiny of atoms.

Quite frankly, I’m glad, if only because I’m an irresponsible little tyke and – if I had any money – I would instantly spunk it all on fast women & beautiful cars instead of investing it as apparently you should, in shares and bonds and other things of which I am only even dimly aware of due to the fact that, once, as a small child, I played Monopoly. So at least I’m spared the burden of responsibility – and, also, the threatening telephone calls I get from pimps & car-dealers appeal to my desire to be the centre of attention. But although I may be hazy about the actual bottom-line I am always careful to be razor-sharp on the individual credits & debits themselves, which is why the bills I get are never quite as big a surprise as this one, a mobile bill for $85,000.

What is that, in real money, anyway? £40,000? My god. You could rent one hell of a fast woman for a lump of cash that big. You could even take a slow woman and, through cosmetic surgery, make her a few cup-sizes faster. Eighty five thousand dollars. That’s like winning the anti-lottery. Your front-door is the portal to the rest of the world in more ways than one, and we are – to a greater or lesser extent – all prepared, at some level, for hesitant knock of a policeman with tragic news (…or, if you’re me, the hammering of a policeman with pinching handcuffs, which is most unfair, because that girl *promised* she was 16…) but we always expect really, really bad news to come in human form, and not inside a brown envelope they’ve had to extend so that they could fit all the 0’s onto the end of the bill.

I wonder why it is that stories about outrageously-large mobile bills always get more press-coverage that those stories about monstrously big gas, water, or tax bills – why is it, of all the utilities we cough up for every month, that your mobile bill seems worthy of the most attention…? Perhaps it’s because it’s so linked to those parts of our lives that are either enjoyable or important, instead of just being the cost of having hot water, or a roof over our head, or the fashionable luxury of these newfangled electric “light bulbs”. Why do we all care so? Using some armchair-psychology, here, is it possible that we’re all a little afraid, ourselves, of whopping great-big bills? It’s not an uncommon situation, after all, to cut a call short just because – like copping off with someone in the back of a 2am taxi – you’ve always got one eye, figuratively, on the clock.
So, as other generations had fables about not playing with gypsies in the woods, will our modern fairytales end up to be about not playing StarCraft in the cybercafé whilst plumbing your net connection through your handset? No. Partly because it’s a difficult image to illustrate, and will therefore never end up in children’s books but mostly because people who play StarCraft in the first place are rather less likely than most to ever have any children anyway.

As such, since salutary lessons on not being bankrupted by your network make for such lame stories it is the case that the government has actually started allocating time in schools, so as to educate the yoof of today as to the dangers of racking up vast charges, which I think to be a mistake, given that if they’re going to spend all their time downloading twatish ringtones with which to annoy the rest of us then they thoroughly deserve to have their juvenile little legs crushed by debt-collectors. It’s a win-win situation, actually, because the rest of us get a bit of peace & quiet and the debt-collectors have an easier time of it, since teenagers’ legs are far easier to break than those of adults (something to do with calcium deposits, apparently) and thus there’s less wear & tear on their sledgehammers.

Male sprogs, by the way, are even more susceptible than their female counterparts to running up bigger debts than their pocket-money can support, if only because they’re that much more likely to get a bit carried away when it comes to…adult content. This kid, for example, was offing himself so often that he offed himself. However, never fear – because there’s nothing you can do to challenge the biggest mobile bill of all time (pay attention, Ewan, because your own efforts are about to be dwarfed), which was for…

…and you must brace yourself, now…

$218,000,000,000,000. Equivalent to more than 17 times the GDP of the United States of America.

Two hundred and eighteen trillion dollars. Cheques made payable to Dr. Evil…

This week — or last week, to be exactly accurate — Ben is not entirely impressed with QR codes and constant change in the mobile industry. Over to Ben…

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The thing about things is, they change. Although this is not the first time I’ve started an article with a statement that wouldn’t sound out of place being slurred by a tramp - you can imagine him, pointing at you with his little blue bottle of turps – it is the first time I’ve felt obliged to explain what I mean. Things change, and always have done, and always will do. This causes problems for humans, who don’t like change, only ever really seeing it in negative terms. This is, after all, why they don’t call the buttfu*king of the planet we live on “Climate Crisis” or “Climate Emergency”. Change is bad, and universally understood to be so.

Fear not, though, because this is not going to be a vague missive about why we should all go out and be green and hug trees (at the eternal risk of wandering off the subject, I think it’s probably a bit late for that, and that we should actually all go out and nerve-gas everybody in the world [with the exception of you, me, the Impossibly Gorgeous Girl from Audit Services & someone else capable of making beer for the rest of us]) but instead is going to be a rather vague missive about why they keep trying to improve mobiles.

Because some of us rather like the way they are now.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that telephones were better when they were bakelite obelisks on people’s desks. I’m not saying that we should all still – as Alexander Graham Bell suggested – answer any & every call by saying “a-hoy hoy?”. I’m not a lover of the flat-world theory and I’m not proclaiming that things were better when bands wrote their own songs (though they were) or when we all did National Service (though they were) or when women didn’t have the vote (though they were). But what I am proposing, what I am supporting, is a view that once something’s already really, really, really good, do you absolutely have to try and keep “making it better?”.

Once something is 99% perfect then you should move on, and channel your enthusiasm to improve things in other areas where you can make sweeping progress, where it’s needed, instead of fart-arsing around rather pointlessly. The classic example of this is the Swiss Army Knife, a design that was pure genius until they tried “making it better” by adding more bits they thought we needed these days and ended up with this absolute monstrosity, which weights a kilo and could quite easily be used to stove in the skull of a charging hippopotamus (which is just as well, really, since running away would be impossible whilst encumbered with something this huge).

The point I’m trying – with my customary fecklessness – to make is that I’m a little worried that mobiles might be going the same way. Because, in these desperately modern times of ours, as there are less & less differences between price-plans, and less & less differences between networks generally, it’s more and more the case that it’s the bells & whistles on your handset that retailers tempt you in with. It started with the incorporation of cameras into phones, which was a perfectly logical step to make, but the trouble with taking perfectly logical steps is that you end up taking another, and then another, and whilst it all seems like a good idea at the time, pretty soon your logical feet have got logical blisters leaking logical pus all over the logical place.

Effectively it’s a problem that occurs when any area of endeavour suffers from a temporary glut of Big Ideas, and all of a sudden you’re forced to tweak instead of strive, rather like athletes who train their entire lives just to desperately try and shave another 0.0005 of a second off of the World Record when they could really be doing something slightly more useful, such as…well…anything, really, rather than mincing about in technicolour lycra. In the same vein, they’re now trying to…well. I’m not actually sure what they’re trying to do - so have a look for yourself.

Turning everyone’s handset into a portable scanner? To read little square barcodes, just so that a company can send you an advert? Why in the name of all that is desecrated and unholy would you want to do that…?

It’s the tail wagging the dog again. Strap me into a snugly-fitting canvas jacket, pop a tranquillising suppository up me and cart my spread-legged body off to the asylum if you think this is, perhaps, just slightly a controversial thing to say, but here we go: I don’t think we should be bending over backwards like this, just so that other feckless industries can turn mobiles into yet another way to spam people with adverts or “infotainment”. In fact, I think it’s taking the piss a bit.

So now’s as good a time as any to sit down, collectively, and have a bit of a think – we all do this with our own lives, every now and then, just to have a quick check on the status of things, and it might be healthy to just take stock. Where should mobiles go, what direction should they move in? They obviously shouldn’t be contaminated by this tacky crap, but should we allow our precious little toys to be fitted out with anything else at all…?

In a way it’s not really worthy getting wound up over, for two important reasons – the first is that, because of the way technology has a nasty habit of lurching out at you from nowhere, things change overnight and the whole picture shifts, so any pondering on the future of things is doomed to epic failure, rather like my attempts to impress the Impossibly Gorgeous Girl from Audit Services by using my previously fool-proof chat-up line about nerve-gassing billions of people. But the second is that, in the same way that change is bad, it’s also unstoppable, and to rail against it – no matter how much it annoys you – puts you right in the same league as King Canute in terms of general effectiveness. There is someone else, since Canute, that has tried to stop time moving, but he’s Michael Jackson, and you don’t really want to be associated with him, now, do you?

So I guess we’ll just have to put up with idiots for now. But if anyone wants to contribute to my nerve-gas fund, then just email me your bank details…

So mobiles have finally killed someone

About bloody time, I say..

I mean, god almighty – for ten, maybe fifteen years now we’ve all been shrugging off the spectre of mast-radiation, of brain-tumours in the same way that a duck shrugs off rain; it’s dull and it’s boring and, yet, it doesn’t do you the faintest bit of harm but – but but but – but it’s just a relief when it stops. When the superstitious nonsense stops and you can just get on with your life.

Or not, as the case may be.

It’s a little bit of a harsh way to go, I’ll admit, is having your mobile phone detonate to the extent that it drives shards of your own ribcage into your heart. It’s the unexpectedness that really makes it terrifying; your mobile lies alongside your Keys and Wallet to make up the Holy Trinity of your life, and the fact that it’s now the case that your phone can kill you stone dead is as unexpected as a doctor ringing you up to say “I’m terribly, terribly sorry, but we’ve had some test-results back and you’ve got a terminal case of Debitcarditis. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do”.

Modern Life – as Blur famously said – Is Rubbish. It’s rubbish for a lot of reasons (Cadburys Crème Eggs get smaller, bills get bigger, that sort of thing) but mostly it’s because, as time goes by, more & more things become dangerous. Cigarettes have gone, in the last twenty years, from being rather dashing to being utterly stupid. Booze has gone from being the amusing diversion of the many to being the last refuge of the jaundice-yellow few. Sex will get you diseased & dead quicker than sharing needles with the Elephant Man and now, it seems, even talking to your friends will break your heart in the most disgustingly literal way possible,

This is the trouble when you let anything into your life; when something becomes as familiar as furniture, that’s when you let your guard down. There are some things around you that you know are a hazard, but you make allowances for them, because the pleasure they give you outweighs the possibility of them suddenly turning nasty and ending your life; the fast drives in your car, all the flights you take, the rohypnol’d illegal immigrants that you have chained up in your love-dungeon. The thing – the nasty, horribly, desperately inevitable thing - about the law of averages is as follows; it catches up with you eventually.

And now, into the calculus of death, we now have to factor in our bloody mobiles! Will it never stop? What next? What’s next on the conveyor-belt of crap to worry about? Global Warming. Bird Flu. Marauding hordes of cannibals storming out of London to eat us all when the housing market finally admits it’s fucked & nobody’s able to afford food anymore. I don’t know about you lot but I’m a busy man, and I’m finding it harder and harder to schedule sufficient slots into my busy diary to sit down and really give these things the worry-time they all seems to deserve. This scheduling problem is compounded slightly by the fact that I daren’t actually check my calendar, given that my handset might go capriciously go pop and take my face off.

The irony of all of this is that phones have been exploding for years. And they’ve been killing people for years; the logic behind this is seductively self-explanational enough for me to lay it before you without any facts to back it up, and goes as follows – why, if you’re a government agency that wants to assassinate someone, go to the bother of training a sharpshooter, and then sending him to possibly get rumbled whilst waiting for a target that may never turn up? Why not, instead, just plant a few grams of semtex in the target’s mobile and then call them, whereupon he or she will – most obligingly – press the explosives directly to their own temple…? From the point of view of, say, MI6, this is perfect; it’s cheap, simple, effective and, if you’re caught, you can just blame LG.

Now, so far – as you may have noticed – I’ve been pitching this article as a substantially heartless flail at a mobile that appears to exploded, which is all fairly pointless, given that this is the first seemingly-verifiable case of a lethal phone out of all the 1.5 billion handsets that have ever been made. You’re over 100 times more likely to win the lottery than you are to have your own heart shucked out of your ribcage by a dodgy battery, so why the fuss? Well, dear reader, the fuss comes from the fact that all of this just highlights not the direct deaths, but the indirect deaths; the indirect maimings, the indirect danger that we’re put in every time we’re distracted or surprised by a call. Banning the use of non-hands-free phones whilst driving was the start of the government acknowledging this as a widespread problem, and there are upcoming changes to the UK’s legislation to ban the use of phones whilst crossing the road (in the Criminal Jaywalking Act 2008) and to ban the making calls to people whilst you’re sat on the can (in the Generally Ickky Justice Act 2009).

In the meantime, though the spectre of your mobile blowing chunks off of (or, indeed, in to) your fleshy, mortal, alarmingly-vulnerable little body is sure to inspire all sorts of impressionable idiots into holding their telephones out at arm’s length and bellowing into it because then – by their idiot logic – it’ll only take their fingers off. However, these are the conclusions of the sort of people who cook their hamburgers twice (so as to get rid of the BSE) and who check their horoscopes so that they can see exactly what’s going to happen to them that day (them, and one twelfth of the population). Hopefully this sort of person will be so worried about the situation that they’ll have a plain old-fashioned heart attack, thus raising the world’s average IQ by a small, but valuable, little bit.

In the meantime, the new challenges posed – in terms of staying alive – have been solved neatly by stowing my phone not in my shirt-pocket (close to some important organs) but instead in my trouser-pocket (close to the most important of organs). This then gives me an excuse to wear my cricket-box all the time, which adds a pleasant extra curvature to my form, and, let’s face it, men risk death & serious injury to impress women all the time anyway…

But when your number’s up, your number’s up…

Well, those ghastly little shoplifters, the Croatians, have done us in quite soundly. Having beaten us by one little goal they’ve deprived England of a place in Euro2008, effectively cancelling the bi-yearly festival of football & alcohol-abuse that graces this green & pleasant land. We’ll have to wait for the World Cup in 2010 until we can next have at crack at any tournament worth bothering with.

2010! Wasn’t that the year we were all meant to be living in giant greenhouses on the moon? Wasn’t that the year that Blade Runner was set it…? How time flies. Anyway, all of this is fantastic news. Fantastic news.

It is. It’s great. Obviously we feel a little gutted now, and, yes, there is the chance that the debacle at Wembley last night means that a number of careers will be destroyed and certain lives wrecked (the reason that goalkeepers have such big gloves, by the way, is so that they’re incapable of tying a rope into a noose after a bad game). And, yes, daydreaming about next summer it does seem, right now, as if we’ll be all the worse off – between the barbeques and the beer in the sunshine – for not having a telly to shout at for half a dozen games or so.

However, that’s all pretty short-term stuff. The reason that England getting knocked out of the Euro2008 finals is fantastic is that we’ll be spared the embarrassingly lame attempts to monetise on the event by every arm of the mobile industry.

And they will be embarrassingly lame, for the simple reason that sport & mobiles go together in the same way that your toaster & your bathtub go together; initially it seems like a good idea, because everyone likes toast, right? And everyone likes baths, right? So combining one with the other must, logically, be win-win. In reality, though, it leads to your rubber-duck melting and your hissing corpse running up an enormous electricity-bill. It’s this kind of reasoning that leads to marketing executives being given a cardboard-box and an escort out of the building by security.

It’s one of the most seductive dead-ends in business, really and, like medieval alchemy, it’s hard for normally right-minded people not to be tempted by the thought of combining sport (vastly wealthy, constantly moving, ravenous audience) with mobiles (vastly wealthy, constantly moving, ravenous audience) to end up with bags full of gold. However, nearly every attempt to do so is a complete car-crash.

In fact, it’s sometimes a quite literal car-crash when an F1 car – plastered with, say, Vodaphone adverts – crunches into a different F1 car plastered, with, say, O2 adverts. I’ve always wondered at the value of sponsorship deals, given the biblical sums of money that companies stump up; people have tried explaining why it’s worth paying five million pounds a year for a matchbox-sized logo above Lewis Hamilton’s left eye, say, but I usually glaze over when they start using words like “message awareness” and usually reach for the hammer when the words “intra-market appeal” roll out of their soon-to-be-smashed-in mouths. I just think their brand-managers might just like drinking champagne in Monte Carlo or Shanghai, personally, but then again, I always have been a little cynical…

Anyway, I feel I should make at least a pretence at supporting my original premise, so here goes – I’m going to ask you, now, to imagine that it’s next June, and also to imagine that we’d qualified for the finals. It’s the summer; it’s baking hot, your local high street doesn’t have any premature Christmas decorations up and not every girl in the entire sodding world is mincing about in those bloody awful ugg-boots they seem to think are so nice (they’re not, by the way, love, they just make you look like you’re wearing the cut-up remnants of some sheepskin carpet). But – it’s summer and, along with the constant adverts for sunblock, and supermarket deals for enough lager to kill yourself for a tenner, we’re all getting spammed silly with idiot deals from mobile providers & TV channels to get either scores sent to us via SMS or 3G snippets of goals we’re lucky enough to be able to pay a quid a time to see.

Call me ungrateful, but I’d rather just watch the bloody match, myself. Same with cricket, same with rugby; updates and highlights and event-driven message services are all well & good on the internet, on your computer where you have the connection, memory & screens-size to make it viable & enjoyable and to try and compress video-clips down to handset-size is, and always has been, lame. In prior generations of technology it was OK to pretend that the grainy, blocky, ten-second clip of a ball being punted into the back of a net was worth paying for but not now – not now we’re all so very used to all the delights of telly-quality snippets downloaded at not-unreasonable speeds.

The ultimate irony here is that mobiles themselves have always been an absolute godsend to those people wanting to play sport as opposed to watch it – for example, I spent most of my Sundays between April and September playing cricket, and the thought of trying to organise 22 men to be at the same place, at the same time, with the logistics of lifts, kit, food, drink, umpires & emergency-trips to hospitals with phone-boxes is just…just…impossible. how did they do it, twenty years ago? How? Even now getting a team or group of people together to play any sort of sport or game is, in the words of my own skipper, “like herding cats”. It’s like trying to imagine working in an office before Facebook – you know generations of people, before you, did it, and lived their lives without it, but just how they did it without going absolutely mental…?

So there we go – my summer will be blissfully free of excruciatingly clumsy attempts to sell me sporting action from whichever group of champagne-chugging ad-boys would’ve been perpetrating such wild & pointless attempts next year and, instead, will be busy making more grainy, blocky, ten-second clips of my own, of me catching cricket-balls with my face again – on YouTube, where they belong.

They say that the secret to great wealth is to sell cheaply to many. However, like a lot of things “they” say, this is total bollocks. It is rather better, after all, if you’re a salesman, to sell one Rolls Royce a month as opposed to one South-Bank hot-dog an hour.

A word on those things, by the way – a microbiologist friend of mine reports that a student of his analysed one of the pork-tubes once (in order to further his despicable vegetarian agenda with quasi-scientific black propaganda, but this pushing it, for digressions, even for me). He found out that it was mostly trotter, and those bits of it that weren’t trotter were cartilage, and the whole thing would - in terms of the damage it would do to someone foolish enough to try & digest it – have about the same effect as injecting a syringeful of suet directly into your neck. But apparently the onions are OK.

That same student never, as far as I know, got around to researching the effects of trying to inject a Rolls Royce into someone’s artery but the financial comparison stands even if the nutritional comparison doesn’t; it’s hard enough to get a punter to part with their hard-borrowed cash in any event, so if you’ve managed to con them into reaching for their wallet you might as well get them to hand over £lots instead of £little.

Rather like upping the bets in poker, though, you do have to do this in increments, otherwise you’ll scare them right off and you won’t get a dime. Charging £269 for an iPhone, for example.

Now, I have – in previous columns – stated quite clearly and deliberately that I am no economist. I do not pretend to have any grip on pricing-strategies, or any deep, Zennish comprehension of the market, and the only instinct that I have for money is my strange ability to jump out of the way before the metal cage clangs down around the cashpoint I was attempting to use half a second previously (a word to my bank – you’ll never take me alive).

As such I do not presume to tell the world anything about finance, since that would be rather like Gordon Ramsey giving a lecture to a Tourettes support-group. As the great philosopher Dylan once said, though, you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. And I know that you measure wind on the Beaufort Scale, but I have no idea how you measure the desperation of O2 salespeople. The “we’re f*cked” scale, perhaps, or possibly the “can I use that noose after you’re done with it” scale.

Ironic, isn’t it. You can imagine their finance guys looking at the total number of iPhones sold on the first day and saying: “Oh. Two.”

Again, I am no businessman. But, opening night at the O2 store in my city and there were twelve staff in the store itself and another outside, hawking out flyers. And how many customers were there inside? Three. One of them was me. The other was my friend Al, rather cruelly winding up the salesman about the data-rates. I recognised the look in the salesman’s eyes – it reminded me of myself, when I approach a girl in a bar and she doesn’t immediately mace me; it’s that mix of unbelieving hope, mixed with the knowledge it’s almost certainly a wind-up.

The third customer, by the way, was just asking how he could put a tenner on his credit. We left him surrounded by five staff trying to incite him into spending £259 more than he wanted to, all of them with an always-be-closing attitude that you only normally see on Foxtons staff or $cientologists.

Poor man. I don’t think he got out of there alive.

Anyway, what’s the solution for O2? Well, there isn’t one. They’ve dropped their trousers & grabbed their ankles in return for Apple granting them exclusivity and now they’re finding that the relationship, like all bum-love, isn’t actually likely to bear fruit. It’s not the iPhone’s fault – we’ve all felt the strange stirrings of love for that delectable little creature, memory qualms aside – but avarice has derailed what could have been a quite beautiful & total & instant domination of this country. Whether Apple are to blame by too high an RRP or whether O2 & CW are being too possessive with the contracts is up for debate but instead of selling cheaply to many - or indeed selling dearly to few – it’s been pitched bang-slap in no-man’s land. And the momentum, the hype, is leeching out & dying on its arse as we speak. In a week or a month nothing will have changed except that the excitement & novelty value will have atrophied. And in a month it’ll be Christmas, which, I think, isn’t going to be a very jolly one for a certain network.

So it’s not the end of the world, it’s just a missed opportunity. We’re all going to get one, but the point is that we should all have them right bloody now. The only negative effects it’ll really have will be those relating to the delays further down the line; say what you want about the device, what it will do, its real blessing, is to up the game of every other network, every other manufacturer and – more importantly – up the game of the consumer. As it drags us all kicking & screaming into a bold new age of…well, I don’t quite know…not quite mobile computing, but not far off…

The slight bungling of its launch here just moves the day further back when we’ll be moving onto its heirs & successors. And you can’t even begin to imagine the sort of hype they’ll roll out for that.

There is a growing fashion, in the world of online publishing (the self-same world, my dear, sweet, reader, into which you are currently dabbling your delicious little toes) to consider the news itself as being something newsworthy. This is currently affecting out worlds by stories about stories – “iPhone coverage reaches frenzy” being one example – and although some people think this is all good and useful I, personally, would rather take a garlic-crusher to my own eyeballs than consider penning something like that – news sites reporting about news always remind me of that rather sinister Greek symbol of the snake eating its own tail, which just goes to show that evolution blessed us with a gag-reflex for a reason.

As such the only mention of the iPhone from me this week will not be any essays on how to survive a night out camping outside your local Apple store (buy a piss-proof tent, buy a petrol-proof sleeping bag, don’t take a dump in the shopping-centre fountain) or on the etiquette of queuing once you’re in (avoid all eye-contact, lest someone talk to you) or indeed on how best to stump up the cash to pay for one (God gave you a spare kidney for a reason). No, the only mention that little slab of joy will get (apart from the two so far already made) will be just a note about its design, which means that, at least, it should be pretty easy to clean.

I am, I should just mention, quite a clean person. This isn’t to say that I’m cursed with hand-bleaching OCD, but just to say that I do the washing-up before the mould on it is granted the right of self-determination by the UN, and also that I do actually clean the oven a few times in any given year. One thing, though, that does rile me just a little is when my handset du jour gets caught by a random glancing stream of light that shows up the inevitable patina of eargrease that gets stuck to the screen of it.

Again, I should state here and now that, as a male in my 20s, I’m well past the stage of getting greasy skin. My teenage years were remarkably spot-free and so I’m at a loss as to where this crap comes from. Every single phone I’ve ever, ever had has accumulated it, the only difference, as time goes by, being that handset-designers apply less & less angularity to their products, if only to stop all the gunk building up in corners. Presumably this is why condoms aren’t square.

Anyway, I get it, you get it, everyone gets it. One swipe along your trouser-leg and it’s gone. Eargrease is obviously a massive and damning hazard to our industry, akin to cave-ins to coal-miners or to falling trees to lumberjacks and I’m sure that one day all us readers of SMStextnews.com will be stood in front of Parliament, waving placards and demanding our MPs protect us from this terrible, terrible curse but, and you must brace yourselves, now – there are worse things to get encrusted in your keys.

Imagine the scene – it’s last Saturday night. It’s a Halloween party. Fancy-dress is obligatory and I attend this extremely-enjoyable piss-up as one of my favourite disturbing characters, a chap from the League of Gentlemen called Papa Lazarou. After using a lot of Blue-Peter-style ingenuity to fashion my own top-hat (including – you’ve guessed it – a lot of double-sided sticky-tape) the rest of the costume was basically daubing myself in thick black stage make-up.

Me and stage make-up, by the way, are no strangers, given that I have been in…one or two films that…well. Let’s just say I’m not too proud of them. Anyway, the thing to remember when wearing make-up is that it’s a complete bastard to get off. So there I am, drinking & scoffing at this party, and I’m thinking – “mustn’t answer phone whilst ears are coated with shoe-polish, mustn’t answer phone whilst ears are coated with shoe-polish”, and all is well. Until the booze does what the booze always does, i.e., makes you forget important things (like where you live, why you shouldn’t accept sweets off of strangers & why not to clasp an expensive piece of electronics to your head when you’re painted up like a black & white minstrel).

I wake up the next day and my phone looks like an elephant’s shat on it.

It didn’t even look that bad after Glastonbury. It was sat there, on a shelf by my bed, covered in a cracked, dried crust that totally obscured what it was. It could’ve been anything, from an ingot of finest cannabis resin to being a slightly overdone brownie. Normally, though it’s the case that a quick swipe with a cloth, maybe some hot, soapy water and you’re fine. In this instance, though, I was finding out that hot, soapy water wasn’t even getting it off my face (nor, indeed, from out from my pillow).

Getting sudden, unexpected sloshes of water in your delicate electronic kit is worrying. And there’s no more worrying place for this to happen than in your handset (with the possible exception of your submarine’s engine), so you can understand why I was reluctant to take my much-abused little mobile into the shower with me. So I tried everything I could think of; chipping off the bigger lumps with toothpicks. Attacking it with a boot-brush. I even thought about ironing a piece of brown paper on top of it, like you do with wax stains, which was a magnificent plan foiled only by my lack of brown paper. And my lack of an iron, for that matter.

In the end, though, I had to bite the bullet. I had to traipse to the chemist and – after persuading the startled girl behind the counter that no, she wasn’t my wife now and that no, I wasn’t actually Michael Jackson and that yes, I would like some make-up remover, if at all possible, if it wasn’t too much bother, yes please thank you NOW! So you will be glad to hear that my face is now back to its normal pasty complexion and my phone does now look like a phone again, albeit one covered in bits of toothpick and with the numbers burnt off all the keys by the acetone

What did strike me about this whole tragic little episode was this one, simple fact – that women have to do this every bloody day…

This week’s column from Ben Harvey (look away if you react negatively to the word whorebox) makes a call from a telephone box whilst lost at midnight in deepest Hampshire.

And thus, we begin.

The Horror

Time, or, rather, the way we feel it pass, is a funny thing. Once something is more than a few weeks old it’s almost as if it might never have happened, becoming as irrelevant as black & white movies, or the English Civil War, or that era of time, long-lost in the mists of history, when people went round saying “Whaaazzzuuup”.

And, in the same way that some things are always as fluid as quicksand – like fashion, or slang, or Orange price-plans - some are always the same, such as the fact that your Grandparents have always been old, or that Cadburys Creme Eggs used to be bigger, or that payphones have always been a hideous embarrassment that you’d rather shower in hippo-wee than actually use.

Phonebooths are admittedly much-maligned. In fact, there are only a few thing held in such universal contempt; Gary Glitter. George Bush. The Health & Safety Directorate. Speed Cameras. It’s the rate of decline that’s shocking, though - ten years ago the sight of a traditional, solid, old-school phonebooth on a Village Green would be listed, in terms of Nice British Icons, right up there with Handel and Cricket and Tea and Teaching Johnny Foreigner Some F*cking Manners. The inner-city ones, though, the glass & steel rectangles, were always - rightly - hated as being nothing more than notice-boards for prostitutes. When the mobile, in the 90s, became as ubiquitous as Facebook it was the beginning of the end for them.

You can still see them, lurking in the hubbub of towns and villages, sat there, sadly, as unused and unloved as the one condom stowed hopefully in your dodgy uncle’s wallet. Ask yourself; with the exception of orchestrating drug-deals, when was the last time you used one? Or when was the last time that you even got a call from someone in one, the conversation punctuated by the distant pumping of 20p pieces into the clunky maw of that stupidly large silver box? It’s a humiliation just to be forced to use one.

So, in a desperate attempt to stop haemorrhaging cash by having to maintain this disparate, desperate network, BT have tried various tactics, all of them feckless, ranging from installing Playschool-style web-access points to plastering their glass sides with adverts, which at least gave the denizens of our cities a little privacy when jetting their veins full of skag. It’s an oft repeated question, why BT don’t ditch every single one of these useless cubicles, and the only possible answer is that it’s a lingering hangover from the terms & conditions of their privatisation. Either that or they like the skag as much as the next man.

Anyway, it is with great regret that I have to admit that, this week, I had to use one. It was a moment of madness and I hope that this frank admission will draw a line under this unfortunate episode in my life. I hope that the media respects the privacy of my family during this difficult time.

My god! My god. It happened three days ago and I still feel unclean. I keep having visions of a dented, scratched receiver, caked with spittle and earwax, dangling like a bedraggled pendulum through the pool of tramp-piss that covered the loveless concrete floor of that firebombed whorebox. It was, though, a matter of life and death; I’d gone out for a bit of a run, you see, and had gotten lost.

“Gotten lost” is a bit of an understatement, actually. Not since Columbus pitched up in America, expecting elephants & Biryani, has a human being been so woefully misnavigated. Training for the Great South Run this weekend meant that I was putting in my last jaunt of seven miles. One missed turn was all it took to guide me down a series of moonlit country lanes, frost forming on my gloves and bleak despair forming in my exhausted, flailing heart. And so it was that the stage was set for my moment of true disgrace.

I left the house at about 8:45pm. At 10:30pm, ten confused miles later, I stumbled across a village called - rather improbably - Ashley. The village of Ashley consists of three houses, a well, a noticeboard stating the historical importance of the well, a sign warning drivers not to reverse into the noticeboard and, saving my life, a phone-box. This being rural Hampshire, there were of course no little postcards advertising local prostitutes, but that’s only because the prostitutes around here can’t read or write.

I will just digress for a moment and state that I’ve always been surprised when the police & judiciary spend so much time, money and effort on vice-squads, arrests, trials, judges etc., when all they really need to do to stamp out the sex-trade in this country would be to eliminate those colourful, collectable, gynaecologically-educational little cards by just banning blu-tack.

Anyway, where was I. Ah yes, I was in the middle of nowhere. I would have knocked on the door of one of the few houses but people who deliberately choose to live as far away as possible from other humans often object to having sweaty, panting men hammer them awake in the middle of the night, and often shoot first, saw your body up in a hay-baler, feed the lumps to the pigs and then ask questions later. As such my one hope was the disgusting, grubby, crappy, retardedly-primitive payphone sat squatting there like a little red toad. Given the state that I was in, brain fogged with insipient hypothermia, it should really have shone out like some holy miracle, glowing with hope, and I’m sure it would have done, had the light not been kicked out by some shithead kid, it being a bloody phonebox.

Anyway, there I was, lit only by the stars, the frozen breath from my wheezing lungs painting frost on the few panes of glass that hadn’t been broken - it being an old-style whorebox, one of the few original red ones that hadn’t been uprooted to make shower-cubicles for Americans- and it was then that the deepest of shames took me; it wasn’t the booth that saved me; it was Holly Valance.

Yes. It’s true. The only reason I could actually call my brother (who guided me home, via Google Maps) was because I remembered the number for 0800-REVERSE, the reverse-charges service that let me make the call in the first place, cross-country runners not being known for taking much coinage out with them. And the only reason that number stuck in my head was because of a dim memory of an argument over whether or not Holly Valance was fit or not. So there we have it. I owe my life to an crapped-out Australian in a crapped-out whorebox. Torrents of shame. Gushing, withering torrents of shame.

I just hope I can serve as a warning to the rest of you all - if you can keep your battery charged, and if you can remember to take your mobile with you whenever you leave the house then you can live a life that’s totally, completely, blissfully whorebox free. For I was like you, once. The only thing that’s keeping me from dying of humiliation is the simple fact that each of those vandalised little lavatories is a monument, a testament to how the mobile-phone industry has totally owned personal calls in recent history. To borrow a phrase: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!

It’s Friday afternoon, and therefore we once again welcome our weekly columnist, Ben Harvey.

They do this, every now and then. Someone comes out with a report, or a proposal, or a consultation on Pmpisp, which isn’t – as it sounds, the name of some short, camp Swiss composer (you can see him now, snuffling into his chocolates because he can’t think of any good tunes that aren’t about war-gold) but is, in fact, a freshly-minted acronym I’ve just made up to allude to people who want to Put Mobile Phones In Stupid Places.

There’s always a constant murmur of um-ing & ah-ing, mostly as to the Underground, with people trying to convince Red Ken to install aerials or cables or boosters or whatever little boxes will enable people to yell into their phones above the wail & shriek & rattle of the tube. It makes a lot of sense, in certain spheres, in that in any given day there’s about three million commuters, a captive audience in their cattle-truck rolling-stock, going to & from work with nothing to do but read skanky free newspapers that shed cheap ink all over you. When the very fact that they’re penned-in and listless means that they really ought to be texting! It’s a criminal waste. Absolutely criminal.

So, even though it would be handy for consumers – and enormously lucrative for the permanently cash-strapped underground network, since they’d have the networks over a barrel – to put this kit in, it’s never happened. A lot of people say that the technical challenges are just too difficult, or that Ken Livingston won’t give his permission simply because he takes the tube to work himself and doesn’t want to get calls from the office for an extra two hours a day.

The real reason, though, in my unhumble opinion, is because it’s a stupid idea. Some places you just need to shut up, to be alone with your thoughts, to process the past or the future; and for that you need the present, the now, to take a backseat. Not all of us want to talk all of the time – it’s quite normal, quite human, to want to cocoon away for a short time every now and then to just get off the ride, so to speak. That’s not to say it’s antisocial, or that it’s withdrawn or shy, it’s just the fact that sometimes you just want to get away. And, if - like most people – you can’t control when you can shut the world off then you can at least enjoy it when the world is the one shutting you off.

So the news that the groundwork is being laid to allow full mobile use on aircraft is, I think, a complete pig. As with the tube, a plane is a long, thin cylinder of bored people who are packed in tight enough to impinge each other’s personal space but, for some cruel & inexplicable reason, actually shagging anyone in transit is distinctly frowned upon. Especially if you’re the pilot. You’re not there for the hell of it, you’re there as a means to an end, which makes the whole event something that you endure instead of enjoy, and, obviously, people deal with this in their own way, either by reading, or watching the films, or staring out the window or, if you’re Peter Buck, by washing your sleeping-pills down with booze and then running around squeezing yoghurt over everyone.

The thing to remember here is that, the more people there are packed around you, the more valuable your privacy becomes. And so to have that invaded by the braying conversation of some buffoon sat three rows behind you would be torture. Imagine a similar flight to the one that Ewan took out to Los Angeles this week to go hobnob with our American cousins – eleven hours in a jumbo, where you can have up to thirty people sat around you close enough to squirt your yoghurt over.

That’d be sixty people for me, by the way, but only because I eat a lot of zinc and work my pelvic-floor.

Eleven hours listening to thirty conversations. Eleven hours listening to message-beeps. Eleven hours, when you’re trying to sleep, or read, and you can’t do anything except go gently mental because some inconsiderate dipstick wants to have an argument with his wife or a discussion with her accountant or wants to call their nutritionist to see if the airline food will give them the shits or not.

Jean-Paul Sartre stated that “hell is other people”. He was almost right – hell is other people when you can’t get away from them because, as I believe I may have mentioned before, everyone is normal until you get to know them. And there’s no better way to get a crash-course in how colossal a cock the person wedged in next to you is than to hear them bitch about how pointy your own elbows are whilst you’re pretending to be asleep.

…there’s also the small point about bombs being detonated remotely just by ringing a mobile wired into a golf-ball of Semtex, of course, but that’s just being pedantic, since al-Qaeda are quite a sporting bunch, really, and would never use anything so obvious, honourable lads that they are…

A little while ago, in the cinema, you may have seen Snakes on a Plane, where Samuel L Bad-Mother-Fucker-Jackson was trapped in the air with hundreds of vipers. This film came about through a bunch of drunk executives trying to come up with the most idiotic, chaos-filled plot in the least number words, and they did such a good job – by coming up with such a cheap, trashy idea – that they actually did make a proper movie out of it (you wouldn’t’ve seen this actually on a plane, though, for much the same reasons that they don’t show Titanic on cross-channel ferries or the Shawshank Redemption in prisons). But even Hollywood, with all its experience and imagination, could not brainstorm a movie plot as ghastly, as terrifying, as generally holistically & comprehensively distasteful as the irritating, frenzy-inducing claustrophobia bought about by the sanity-eroding burble of other people talking non-stop bollocks for what used to be a deliciously peaceful period of serene cloud-spotting. See? even the mere idea is making me froth and flail quite rabidly. Should this all come to pass, you could easily identify me at any point above the Atlantic because I’ll be the one trying to bite a window open in an attempt to let the air out and thus let blessed silence in.

The one upside to letting phones on planes, though, is that you’ll be able to call the police when the fights break out. Happy landings!

Back once again, our weekly columnist Ben Harvey.

People have often asked me when I’m going to come out of the closet. I mean, it’s not as if I haven’t dropped enough hints, over the years. All the innuendo, all the signs. But times have changed, and in these liberal, accepting days of personal freedom I feel able to come out and admit the truth to myself, to my friends and, hardest of all, to my parents.

Because, you see, I am a Tory.

There! I’ve said it. All those years of repression, of guilt, of the pant-wetting terror of being Found Out. All that laughing along when my friends made jokes at the expense of My People. Hoarding my secret literature under my bed and being very, very careful with my internet-history…it feels funny, this sensation of not having to hide who I really am any more. I wonder if there’s some sort of march I can take part in.

Anyway, I mention this because My People are mustering, coagulating out of the shadows and running together like hot mercury, all because we’ve finally decided that the forces of Evil Commie Socialism in this country are overdue for a damn good kicking. For example, these postmen! The postmen – or is it “postpeople” these days? “Postperson Pat” doesn’t quite scan, does it – are striking, are gang-f*cking the entire country because they’re upset that their statutory right to have twenty-eight tea-breaks a day and to be able to spend three hours on the shitter are being politely questioned by the people who pay them their wages.

It’s a bit of a grim trend, really. Firemen, tube-drivers, now the legions of posties, all whining for more cash, better pensions, more time on the can. They’re a red tide, dear reader, a vile flow of pinko slackers intent on eroding all that is good and noble in this country. Since the unwritten rules of good behaviour & gentlemanly conduct mean that we can’t actually roast these idiots on their own picket-line braziers without getting a sharp note from the UN we are, instead, going to have to go resolve this sorry state of affairs through the ballot-box. And although our election hopes rest on David Cameron – a man without a chin – he is at least in possession of a backbone, which is more than can be said for Gordon Brown.

Or should that be Gordon Yellow?

The postal strikes have hamstrung this country. They’ve transmogrified us into a third-world nation, where cheques really do go missing in the post, where pensioners go hungry, where the thesaurus I bought off eBay is delayed to the extent that I’m forced to use words like “transmogrified”. It’s humiliating. So; the course of action is clear. We can either give these work-shy Trotskyites what they want, and end up paying, say, some gutty Cockney tube-driver £40k a year to mutter snide remarks about standing clear of the doors* or we can just get rid of them.

I’m for the latter. The sooner people realise that human beings are essentially disposable, the better – if, say, the battery in your phone is malfunctioning then you wouldn’t think twice about ripping it out and replacing it with another one, pausing only to set fire to the defective chunk of lithium simply because it tells you not to in such big writing. As such we must tear these defective people from our midst, the only small problem, of course, being how to send them their P45s when there’s no mail.

So - where am I going with this, apart from the inescapable conclusion that Gordon Brown should be sentenced to a life of licking envelopes in some otherwise-empty sorting-office somewhere? Well, I just thought I’d gloat, partly in The Enemy scoring a set of own-goals that portray them as having all the competence, courage & influence of those Suicide Bakers who tried to blow us all up with chapati flour last year. Most of my gloating, though, is due to the economics - the repercussions that mean that whilst you can try and derail the lines of data and correspondence you can never actually stop the message getting through; you can only divert it.

And what did people do when they couldn’t send post? They made telephone calls. They sent email and e-faxes. They punted everything over to intranets. The only organisations that couldn’t adapt were moribund government departments, direct-mail & subscription providers, companies supplying low-priority goods and those firms whose admin managers are too set in their obsessive-compulsive ways to do anything even vaguely differently.

Higher call traffic = kerching. Higher data-rates = kerching. You can have as many strikes as you like, my card-carrying darlings, because for us in this industry it’s a little Christmas every time you do. Which does beg an interesting question; is the mobile world vulnerable to industrial action, at all…?

Happily, the answer is “almost certainly not”. It’s vulnerable to blackmail, yes, and to extortionate wage demands from BOFHs who know where all the skeletons are and, as the demarcation between call-networks and data-networks meld further into the internet it might be the case that, one day, we’re bought to our knees by a spotty 15 year-old and his million-strong legion of virus-slaved PCs. But a strike would obviously only be a problem if it came from those people who could knock out swathes of coverage, services & routing at the flick of a switch, so it’s just as well that we pay the technicians in the business so very well, isn’t it?

God. I should stop giving them ideas…

*oh no…hang on! We’re doing that now!

Friday, 3pm, it’s time for Ben Harvey’s weekly column. This week’s subject: Losing it

- - -

Oh, god, there should be a word for it. You know that feeling, when you’ve been in an argument with someone, and you’re thinking back about what you said, and the perfect point, the perfect reply, the perfect quip pops in your head half an hour or half a day too late? There ought to be a word for that feeling.

There probably is a word, in German. They’re good at that sort of thing. Schadenfreude, for example.

If I had to describe it, it feels like that split second when the lock in your front-door snicks shut and you realise that your keys are still on the kitchen table, but slowed down quite a lot. Anyway, I found out today that this feeling doesn’t just apply to having the right retort in an argument, it applies equally well to not having the right bit of kit at the right time.

For example – one upon a time I was mugged. It wasn’t terribly violent and I wasn’t badly hurt and so, in these terrible days of stabbings and drugs and kidnapping and such it probably ranks, in the world of crime, about as seriously as not clearing up your Labrador’s dog-egg, or drinking three whole pints and then driving home.

The whole affair actually makes for quite an amusing story, if only because the gentleman that did rip me off did so whilst I was talking to my girlfriend at the time, the poor girl hearing the patter of footsteps down an alley and then various enthusiastic male grunts, leading her to the inevitable conclusion that I was actually dogging with this fellow.

Other strange aspects of the case include the fact that the villainous cad who wrestled me for my handset did so whilst not actually having a top on, a fact which led the police, when I described him as being “quite a well put together young man”, to the inevitable conclusion that – you’ve guessed it - I was actually dogging with this fellow.

And, finally, the reason he was finally caught was due to the fact – half an hour later – that he was nonchalantly standing in the same queue for the bus as me round the corner from Tottenham Court Road. I did jump in a phone box (Christ – haven’t done that for a while…) and call the boys in blue who did, admittedly, turn up in about ten seconds, but their speed was, I think, mostly due to the fact that they were hoping for a wedding invite as, in their eyes, our relationship must’ve blossomed from mere dogging into something serious. I mean, why would he be catching the same bus as me otherwise…?

Anyway, I did manage to explain the situation and the nasty man got carted off in the back of a police-car, which was excellent news all round, especially since I got his seat on the bus. I got a sit-down and he got six years in prison, as the chap turned out to be an itinerant crack-dealer and – Pete Docherty aside- it seems as if the justice system in this country does actually lock people up every now and then.

What, you may quite rightly be asking, does all of this have to do with strange German words for not having the right bit of kit at the right time? Well, I’ll show you - if only I’d had this in my pocket.

800,000 volts! Eight hundred thousand! More sparks than that time I accidentally put my brother’s laptop in the microwave. Oh, that would’ve been sweet. How powerful is that, anyway? It’s coming up to the sort of kick where you could send a Delorean through time, isn’t it? But yes. I would quite happily have handed my phone over to the mugger then…

It does strike me as most peculiar, though, that the main thoughts that went through my mind – as I was manhandled by this fellow with a criminal lack of care – had nothing to do with the fact that he might stab me, or that my girlfriend’s tinny screams were rising up between our writhing, fighting fingers, or even that this half-naked gentleman was pushing himself against me in a dark alley without even having bought me dinner first. The things that went through my mind were “Oh, f*ck! I’ve not backed-up my numbers for months!” and also “I wonder how much trouble Vodafone are going to be about the insurance”.

I do have to admit that often the thoughts that I have at times of crisis are sometimes not perhaps the ones I should be concentrating on, the normal topics of my mental narration usually involving girls, whisky and where the nearest vendor of pork pies are, but that was pushing it, even for me. Worrying about the administration of replacing the handset isn’t, you’d’ve thought, the best way to use your mind when that self-same handset is currently being robbed from you.

But! But, apparently, I am rather wrong. Speaking to three friends that have also had their mobiles mugged off them, two out of the three did indeed panic more about the data on the phone, the actual fact they were being kicked and punched being something of an inconvenient side-effect. The other friend, Nick, was actually more worried about the method of mugging, but that’s because he was mugged by a girl and was busy thinking how the hell he was going to explain it to everyone.

Oh well. It’s his own fault for going to Norfolk in the first place.

This may be fruitful grounds for a research project, in fact. Do Nokia users fight back harder than those about to lose their Sony Ericsson? How much more do you struggle if it’s your own phone, as opposed to a company one? And just how many tears, as measured in millilitres, would an iPhone owner weep if you lifted their new toy scant days after they bought it? Who says science has to be dull…I’m sure we could get a grant for this sort of thing…

Sit back in your office (or arm) chairs and take a read of this week’s column by our Friday regular Ben Harvey.

Ben attempts to explain why the room full of analysts, mobile industry executives and journalists at the Blyk launch this week weren’t quite all so sure about ‘free’ — especially when they weren’t getting any.

Someone once went out - with one of those thumb-clicky counter-things that bouncers look at just before telling you that the bar’s full - and counted the number of adverts that a human walking through central London would be exposed to in the course of an hour.

1470, they counted. I hope for their sake that one of the adverts they saw was for RSI treatments, because after two clicks a second, for whole hour, their thumbs can’t've been in terribly good shape. I tried the same study in the 15 minutes it takes me to get to work today and you’ll be pleased to know that my own little pink prong wasn’t overworked at all, because I only saw four adverts. Four! One of those was on the side of a van which drove past me twice, and one of those was the Apple logo on the side of the iPod that I’d already bought. So only two, effectively. And they were only effective because they were Nike & Adidas logos on the rather deliciously lithe girls that bounced past me on their morning run.

I may need some RSI medication after all. My wrist is killing me.

The reason I tell all of you this is not to make excuses for the small pile of leaves & branches around my desk, which fell off me as a souvenir from my time spent lurking happily in the bushes that morning, but instead to illustrate the difficulties of advertising to some people. Humans have the most sophisticated ways to screen out things they don’t want to see, whether it be full-page adverts in a magazine or the poor sod trying to sell you the Big Issue containing those adverts in the first place.

It goes without saying that there are hundreds of thousands of people who would like it if you bought their products or bought into their message. From religions to car dealerships, from delicious oriental food to delicious oriental masseurs there’s this never-ending plethora of people, pulling at your trouser-leg with all the desperate need for attention of a toddler about to make a personal puddle.

The trouble comes from the fact that 99% of all the adverts you see are complete bollocks. Either they’re for something you don’t want, or they’re for something you can’t afford, or they’re for something that will make you fat / fatter / dead. The only ways ad agencies can get your attention is to either arouse you or offend you or impress you; impressing is difficult, because that requires talent. Offending you is difficult, because it’s a fine line to tread between shifting units and having your offices burnt down by a rampaging mob from the Family Values coalition. So they have to try and arouse you, and, to be fair, there is a long & illustrious history of fitting nobbing into adverts, although it does usually involve a lady sucking off her Flake in the bathtub.

Since we, as consumers, are increasingly dismissive of anything but Oscar-worthy adverts it’s become an ever-more frantic trade. If brands aren’t bribing farmers to get billboards stuck in fields by motorways then they’re paying some spiv £50k to have their logo tattooed on his head. And now we’ve reached the logical conclusion of this pathetically needy trade with Blyk, the “virtual” mobile-phone network that - in return for free telephone calls - will spam you with “infotainment” to basically affect a system of product-placement in the movie of your life.

I have numerous issues with this. First off, the name. Is it me, or does the whole enterprise sound like it’s South African? Eets nit a virry gid neem, es et? En fict, hits toytal sheet. So I was a little surprised to find out that the idea - and the team - is Finnish, and that the chaps behind it all seem to have parachuted out from the upper tiers of Nokia’s research & management crowd.

So, if you’re aged between 16 and 24 then, in exchange for the - seemingly arbitrary - sum of 217 free texts and 43 free minutes every month you can get yourself a Blyk SIM. Free messages! This will obviously be very enticing to the PAYG crowd, or, at least, it’ll be enticing before their goldfishesque attention-spans keep getting derailed by spam advertising. The thing is, the Blyk business-plan has been created by proven entrepreneurs, and verified by econometricians with MBAs and other impressive qualifications that I can’t understand and, some of which - being Finnish - I can’t even pronounce. And then they’ve gone and pitched this to hard-edged investment banks whose job it is to seek out idiot ideas. And they were not found wanting.

So what right have I, a bush-lurking pervert, to pour scorn on their majestic & noble endeavour, when the only even-vaguely entrepreneurial idea to ever enter my tiny little skull was “buy another scratchcard”?

Well. Put it this way. The glossy reams of junkmail that are prepared at great effort, and printed at great expense, and then poked impudently through your letterbox - when was the last time you actually bought anything from them…?

It’s a little easy to remember that the whole reason that –those six or seven long, long years ago – the entire internet industry was bought to the very brink of implosion was because everyone thought that ad-revenue would pay the bills. The sites would thrive, and the consumers would get everything free, and the advertisers would pick up all the bills – the suckers!

When was the last time you clicked on a banner-ad? When was the last time you shut-down your pop-up blocker so that you could let those nice men & women share their new products with you…? Or, alternatively, when was the last time you went apeshit because you got irritated? The prosecution rests, M’lud.

Hmmn. Maybe that’s why I’m so sure that this whole enterprise will hit the rocks very quickly. Or, you know, maybe it’s just because I’m not as young as 24 anymore, and am therefore bitter… Nevermind. It’s a lot easier to take the piss when you’re not impartial.

Today, Ben is wrapped in a long raincoat with spy-hat tipped strategically down over his eyes — he wants to know where you are, right now…

- - - - -

Location, Location, Location…

Rather like opening bottles with their teeth, we all know someone that can do this. In fact, given the audience I’m writing for, we all probably know more than one person – someone who has this ability, this skill, the means to make it happen. They’re like drug-dealers, in the way they introduce you to the wares they pedal; furtive, casting their eyes about the room before they drop it into the conversation, because what they do isn’t exactly legal.

It’s actually very illegal. And, again like narcotics, the supply of this commodity relies on a string of people from the source to the consumer, although unlike narcotics this isn’t something that you have to fund by selling your botty down Piccadilly Circus.

Tracking mobile phones. We all know someone that can do it but we’re buggered if we quite know how – there’s the basic science approach, of course, which is that (and forgive me, here, if I’m spouting the complete knucking obvious) the reason they’re called cellular phones is that the reception is handed, as you move about the country, from geographical cell to geographical cell, the call being handed from base-station to base-station like Tarzan swinging from vine to vine. And, of course, the side-effect of this is that it’s necessary for the system to know where you are in order to route your call.

And if it’s in the system, then some clever chap can interrogate the enormous data-logs of the phone operators and find out roughly where you are. “Roughly”, though, often doesn’t cut the mustard, given that a base-station on, say, the Isle of Skye handles rather less traffic than a tower perched on the roof of some sex-shop in Soho (I was very disappointed, by the way, the first time I ever visited Soho. I was expecting dead pornographers in gutters, and gum-chewing harlots lingering under every red street-light. Instead I found 302 pizzerias, 106 graphic-design agencies and one newsagent that sold adult DVDs. The newsagents was closed).

The really useful trick is triangulation. The various people I’ve spoken to on this subject say that, by comparing signal-strengths between towers you can – as long as you have sufficient access to the back-room technology behind the networks – get a trace on one particular mobile number down to an area the size of your average garden shed. That’s best-case, though, given an inner-city concentration of towers and nice, flat geography – again, things would be a little more ropey on the Isle of Skye (which, just in case you need to know, has 0 pizzerias, 0 graphic-design agencies and a newsagent who will drag you out and shoot you unless you ask for anything other than a copy of Sea Fishing Monthly).

Now, obviously the fact that there are people out there doing this is cause for some concern. Or is it? Is it really that much of a problem? First off, we can assume that the authorities do it on a daily basis – a state with the most number of CCTV camera per person in the world, a police force that swabs you for the DNA database should you so much as drive to the shops with one brake-light gone, well…it’s not going to balk at using such a powerful surveillance tool in return for bunging a few knighthoods at those gents in charge of infrastructure. Remember – you’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you.

Agent Mulder rants aside, you look up “Private Detectives” in your local Yellow Pages (this is the first time in five years I’ve actually opened my copy of this tree-slaughtering waste of time. I only actually ever use it to cosh the scumbag delivery-boy who, every year, would try and squeeze the new & equally-pointless copy through my letter-box otherwise). Give the nice gentleman in the trenchcoat a call and ask him – and it is always a him. Women seem to have better things to do than to sit in Ford Mondeos, smoking Rothmans and doing Sudoku whilst keeping an eye on a wife who’s having an affair. Personally, if your husband is going to set people to spy on you then I think you’re morally entitled to bonk as many other people as you like, but hey. You give your local gumshoe a call and see if they trace people using their mobiles and I’ll bet you that they do.

Again, this is something that seems to have gently percolated down in the last few years. At the risk of flogging the drugs analogy to death it does remind me of cocaine, in that it used to be something that rock-stars snorted off of models in Parisian penthouses and now it’s something that chavs snort off fruit-machines in Wetherspoons in Wigan. Please excuse me, now, because I although I am aware that I have flogged this analogy to death, I’m going to hold a séance so that I can bring it back and flog it some more – drugs aren’t legalised because they do a lot of harm, both physically and mentally, and also clog up all our valuable fruit-machines. Thing is, why don’t networks make this tracking service available to the public without the namby-pamby mobile aggregators getting in the way? Why not make it point-and-click?

As long as people had the opportunity to opt-out of the commercial service – the illusion of privacy is, for some reason, important to some people – wouldn’t this be one hell of an application? Pay, say, O2 a fiver through a web-based Google Maps mash-up interface and, ping, ten seconds later they can give you the location of your boss to within fifty feet. Pay a tenner and it’ll show you their last 100 locations. Worried about where you son is? Wondering how long it will be until your wife manages to fight her way through the rush-hour traffic, so you can time dinner? Or just want to know where your ex-girlfriend is, because you’re a psycho? Fiver, ping, result. Everyone’s a winner. Apart from your ex-girlfriend. You know, that page-three girl in Sea Fishing Monthly looked just like her…

There are some myths, some lies so outlandish & absurd & patently false that they linger in the mind of society simply because their improbability impresses us so very much. Like the one, for example, about Prince (or Volvo, as my Aunt calls him, after seeing his rebranded symbol) who - as legend would have it - had a couple of his ribs removed so that he could bend over far enough to be able to auto-fellate himself.

There’s a reason that evolution specifically designed men to not be able to do this, by the way. It’s because those offshoots of early man that were blessed by nature to be able to suck themselves off never actually had any reason to leave their caves, never encountered that mysterious black monolith and so went down the evolutionary cul-de-sac that top geneticists now have termed “Belgium”.

There are, of course, other blatantly fabricated myths that linger for the simple reason that they’re so much more interesting than the truth. Jamie Lee Curtis being a hermaphrodite, for example - kids at school still bandy that whopper around the place, albeit with slightly less idea who Jamie Lee Curtis is than we did. I remember being told that at school some fifteen years ago, and laughed along with my friends even though, if I’m honest, I actually thought that Hermaphrodite was a type of Greek salad.

Anyway, every nation has these cherished lies. Having something we all believe in has helped glue us together as a collective since we all got bored with God. The flipside of this, of course, is that there are things we collectively don’t believe in, that we reject out of hand and that we blithely snort at as being obvious nonsense.

Mobile phones giving you cancer, for example.

It’s been a constant, never-ending dribble of warnings, reports, research studies, testing, consultations, experiments and government committees. You’d have thought, by now, that - like other constant dribbles - some sort of stalactite would have been the result, a pointy, solid mass of fear that would actually stop us from spending a good chunk of our day with that little radioactive brick half an inch from the wet grey sponge that makes us.

I guess it’s a question of relative risk - one news story about a Great White shark off the coast of Cornwall and, across the whole UK, swimming-trunk sales plummet by 30%. Several thousand stories about telephones giving you head-cancer and we still have more mobile phones in this country than we do people (a statistic rivalled only by the USA, where there are more guns than people. Logic would dictate that we kept buying speedos and just invited yanks over here to shoot the shark, but, hey, that’s statistics for you).

It’s a very British response to anxiety. We discard all the evidence, all the articles and news-stories we hear about this, and just take a subconscious look at what the person next to us in the queue is doing; Britons only ever object to mobile-phone usage in leaderless, neighbourly groups, usually with placards saying things like “Upper Whittering Parish Neighbourhood Watch Against Phone Mast Peril!”. And even then it’s less because of the health concerns and more because the Daily Mail said that phone-masts bring down house-prices. Panic by committee. How perfectly English.

It’s a little like cannabis, actually, in that we’re told again and again and again that it might be dangerous, that it might have long-term effects, that it might damage you cumulatively. Also, like cannabis, it’s not actually possible to point to any one individual that’s died in this country as a direct result of mobile-phone use - there’s no dead business-woman or salesman that the opposition can use as a poster-boy for their cause. Of course, mobile-phones kill hundreds of people indirectly, either because they’re dialling whilst driving, or they get stabbed whilst being mugged, or maybe they get bum-gangrene when it gets stuck after calling Mr. Prostate. The only real difference is that the government reaps vast sums of tax from the industry and therefore has rather compelling reasons not to bang up the directors of Carphone Warehouse for Intent to Supply.

The reason I’m bleating on about this is that, again, we’ve had a report saying that there’s “a slight hint of a cancer risk for long-term users“. Some people think covering your head with tinfoil protects you, but these scientists are obviously more concerned with covering their arses. A “slight hint of a risk”? Cretins. What use is that? They sound like Jilly Goolden tasting wine. “I’m getting…yes, yes, just a slight hint of…tumour. The merest whiff of peaches and chocolate and oodles of electromagnetic damage to the RNA on my palate”. With fundamentally pointless, litigation-proof idiocy like this, is it any wonder that we ignore them? It’s the oncological equivalent of the joint of lamb I had for tea in the week - “Warning!” the box said. “Contains raw meat!”.

Pointless bloody scientists. If your plumber, after looking over your boiler, said “yeah, well, it might be leaking. That’s £200, please”, then you’d fill his trouser pockets with gravy and set the dogs on him. Yet apparently wearing a white coat gives you carte blanche to reel out this sort of toss and then award yourself another degree for it. The reason this makes me angry is that there’s so much confusion in the population about the radiation that phones kick out that the government has a moral duty to find out about this and actually come to some useful conclusions instead of merely attempting to placate the concerned housewives of the land by throwing the occasional grant at the occasional gimp with a Geiger-counter and some letters after his name. And goodness me, wasn’t that a long sentence.

Just because you can fob someone off doesn’t mean that you should. There is an argument that the Powers That Be resolve this issue completely simply so that the idiotically-skittish members of the population that do actually worry about this sort of thing will calm down and buy phones, putting money in our pockets like the good, docile, obedient little drones that they are. Personally, though, given the nations’ obsession with gambling, it may actually shift more units if retailers take ten random handsets for sale from their stores and replace the lithium batteries with plutonium batteries – introducing such an element of risk to the business of buying phones will provide more of a hit than any scratch-card imaginable…

…I am a business genius…

PS: Whilst finding out just how the hell you spell “Goolden”, I found this. You should check out the “personal life” section, if only as a shining beacon of the impartial & utterly reliable nature of Wikipedia…

This week Ben Harvey is seriously unimpressed with Steve Jobs and Apple. So deeply unimpressed was he, that he emailed his column with the subject “What a bunch of frigtards”. I had to look up that word definition.

Here we go — over to Ben:

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Sometimes you just can’t swear enough. When you stub your toe or step on a plug. When your car won’t start, or when your alarm-clock falls asleep. Sometimes you simply cannot lay your hands on a powerful enough swearword to throw back at life. They said, when the hydrogen bomb first burst on the scene, that this fierce, terrible, awesome thing would – over a few years – lose its nobility and power, slipping from being a god-grade weapon with which to end the world to instead become an every-day tool for quarrying and landscaping and harvesting lots of crops at once.

This is obviously patent toss – because, let’s face it, everything they said in the 1950s was patent toss (Where are the cities on the moon? Where is my flying car…?) - but it does neatly encapsulate our modern swearing problem. When it came to expressing our anger or hatred we did once have an equivalent the hydrogen bomb. It was a four-letter long word that began with C and ended with T (and rhymes with “c*nt”) / and Scunthorpe would look pretty silly without it. And, like they fecklessly predicted for the H-bomb, it’s gone from a device with enough explosive force to end any argument into being an every-day tool to describing your taxi-driver, or your boss, or even the poor old dear in the queue who can’t find her nectar-card and who holds you up for those twenty seconds that, you know, you were going to do something really important with.

Perhaps, actually, this happened with the profanities your parents used. Perhaps the word “fudge” used to make vicars faint when they heard it. Perhaps “sugar” used to give gracious ladies instant, spurting nosebleeds if a navvie or a rogue used it within earshot, and – as we are finding for ourselves – it’s simple over-use that has robbed the word of satisfying impact.

Why have I wasted these valuable seconds of your life with three paragraphs about swearing? With the written equivalent of apologising to the cashier whilst I fumble for my nectar-card? It’s because I was reading a letter from Steve Jobs to the long-suffering Apple-buying public and, in my resulting fit of puce-faced apoplexy, I was stumped to find a word suitably vile enough to label him with.

I hear that Russian is the most satisfying language to swear in, with Polish a close second, which I imagine meant that Steve Wozniak at least never ran out of things to call the bald little Napoleon that runs Apple. And why was I groping around for verbal rocks to hurl at Jobs, in the first place? Because the man in control of Apple has revealed himself to be a complete bastard.

Apple, alas, has gone from an estranged monastery of genteel geniuses, mostly irrelevant to the real world, to being (and you may have noticed) an unignorable player in the mobile-telephone arena. They’ve done this basically because they’ve coined so much money from taking over the entire walkman industry - and making serious inroads into dominating online music sales - that they literally didn’t know what to do with it all and so decided to take a punt at mobiles. Well, why not? What else can you do with all that cash? You try finding a bank willing to let you put half a trillion dollars in a 6% savings account…

As with any other sphere of human existence, parallels can be drawn with football. This is all strikingly similar to all those poor Premier League clubs that found themselves bought-out by some instant oil-tycoon from a tin-pot shit-hole of a country (aka, Russia). Abramovich buying Chelski, for example, is quite a fitting analogy; devious upstart with no morals finds he has more money than God and so buys his way into an expensive business. It’s not the fact that Apple are elbowing their way into the industry that makes me furious, because I am a rabidly proud capitalist; it’s the arrogance with which they’re doing it.

It’s this if-you-don’t-agree-with-us-then-you’re-a-cretin mindset that riles me, and also makes me wary about the whole Jobian business-model for their future tactics with mobile services. For example, the letter published above was a reply to the thousands of Americans who’d bought iPhones at or around the RRP of $600 and who were – quite reasonably – a bit annoyed when the price was slashed to $400 only a couple of months after they’d been released. All of this is, I must admit, superficially academic to us Brits who have to wait for our shiny new toys (shush, all of you smug importers!) but it does prove useful as an analytical tool with which to dissect the Apple mindset.

Firstly, the apology isn’t an apology. It’s an argument. Jobs writes the problems at the top and then disagrees with it. He takes the vocal feelings of his most loyal, rich & tech-savvy devotees and brushes them under the carpet with stubborn rebuttals and preposterous crap about why they should be grateful that more people will be introduced to the joys of the iPhone as Christmas presents.

Secondly, this proclamation is certifiable, admissible, cast-iron and irrevocable proof that the man is a twunt. If, say, your uncle was boring you over dinner by pontificating at you and said things like “being in technology for 30+ years I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy” and “this is life in the technology lane” then you’d snap your placemat against the table to get a sharp edge and then punch it through his trachea. “…being in technology for 30+ years…” is the modern version of “…when I were a lad…” and coming out with bilge like “this is life in the technology lane” is the verbal equivalent of wearing flat-caps and breeding whippets. The man’s an arse.

Thirdly, you should always watch out for people who start their paragraphs with “Firstly….Secondly…Thirdly…”. People like that usually have an agenda.

So, to recap, he’s an arrogant little tit, albeit one who’s a complete genius. I love his products, and I do respect his vision, but I despise the man himself, and the fact that he’s going to be invading the UK market soon is unsettling and increases the odds of something horrid happening in what was once a relatively pleasant neighbourhood. Like having Gary Glitter move into the house next door, in fact. But, looking on the bright side, at least he’s going to make things interesting…

PS: last week I introduced some of you to the yearly tradition of Silly Season, which is when national newspaper editors go on their summer holidays, and their deputies get to muck about with the news whilst they’re away. Behold! The perfect example….