I have never been one to follow trends or at least when I did follow them, it was just around the time they were going out of fashion. I got the Millennium Falcon for Christmas more than year after the last of the original Star Wars trilogy was released. When my peers were wearing lumberjack shirts and kaftans, I was walking around in one of my brother's long black crombie coats, like someone out of Echo and the Bunnymen. I didn't buy a CD until 1995.
I've been a late adaptor to most things and have never been too bothered by the mockery that has accompanied my tardy reactions to fashion. But I have been surprised by the gasps, sniggers, titters and even guffaws that many of my fellow humans have emitted on seeing my mobile phone.
For me, the Samsung GT-E1200 is a highly sophisticated piece of technology. It allows me to make and to receive calls and text messages from just about anywhere I wish to be, it has time-telling and date-informing functions as well as an alarm clock, calculator, stopwatch, counter, timer and torch-light.
But when I produce it from the inner pocket of my crombie, before they start to laugh, many people look at it as though it were a homing pigeon I was about to launch into the air. Yes, I cannot take photographs with it and yes, I cannot access the internet or fill it with lots of useful apps. How can I cope without having all that stuff available to me at all times? So far, just fine.
Much as I enjoy looking at other people's photographs, I have little interest in taking snaps of my own. I like keeping the internet separate from my person as I already have enough trouble regulating the amount of the time I spend on it when I am at home. I also like to work out sums and to think about trivia without being able to check on the information machine. I can use a roadmap for directions on the rare occasions when I stray off my well-worn paths and I'd rather read from pages than off a screen because I like the feel of books and newspapers. I realise that for younger readers that will sound hopelessly eccentric but some people drive vintage cars even though it means they have to roll down the windows by hand. I also want to keep my one to one interactions with people as technology-free as possible.
One of the most interesting developments of the smartphone era is how some people have begun to illustrate their conversation with photographs from their mobiles. They won't just tell you about their children or their holiday or their colonoscopy - they'll add in the relevant snaps to jazz up the chat.
I recently met up with an old college friend and when I asked her what she'd been up to in the intervening decade, she proceeded to give me a quick rundown of the main events complete with a phone display of photographs of the country she had moved to, the partner she had met, their wedding, their children, their house, and the graveyard plot she had chosen to be buried in (I may have made up that last bit).
On the one hand, I thought, how wonderful to be able to carry a little powerpoint presentation of your life with you at all times, but on the other hand, if this kind of behaviour becomes normal what the hell is going to happen to language and more specifically, our ability to describe things? A picture can be worth a thousand words but words can be a lot more interesting than pictures.
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