When I lost my phone recently I suffered a bout of mobile anxiety. Gone, all gone, the numbers I had stored up in the phone instead of writing them down in a notebook like I always promised myself I would, writes Róisín Ingle
I wouldn't mind but I had just hunted down Louis Walsh's contact details after losing them the last time, and every self-respecting journalist knows those precious digits are the very lifeblood of our profession. But it wasn't the missing numbers that grieved me so, rather it was the long lost text messages that were causing me most pain.
Gone, all gone, my messages, I moaned to my terminally unsympathetic little sister.
Oh really, said she, who do you think you are, Rebecca Bloody Loos? Actually for her information there were a couple of explicitly romantic texts in among the treasure trove of messages. The kind you keep because sometimes you need reminding. I xxxx you. You said you'd be xxxx by xxx. Don't forget to put the xxxx out. That kind of thing.
The other ones I miss are from friends. Messages containing things that probably wouldn't mean anything to anyone else. One of them, for example, read "To ourselves! For ourselves!" I can't remember what prompted that particular Sauvignon Blanc-fuelled bout of independence (it could, of course, have been the Sauvignon Blanc) but it always used to make me smile.
I have another friend who sends entire sentences from The Office or quotes from the ancient yet still classic comedy sketch show A Bit of Fry and Laurie. He is never short of something to say, type or text. The last few days I haven't heard much from him though. Our texting has been a one-way street. He had phoned from the hospital lift saying that she only had a few days left. I was standing beside a flower stall on Grafton Street and it suddenly didn't seem so depressing that the hot pink skirt I was lusting after wouldn't go past my thighs.
I couldn't do her justice here. Like her son, she is one in a trillion. If Santa came around to her house at Christmas time, even he'd be shocked by the amount of Yuletide paraphernalia decorating every surface of every room. Do you like my new reindeer, she'd ask, pointing to two overgrown Rudolphs on either side of the mantelpiece. Yes, I would say, and when I cracked up laughing at the over-the-topness of it all, she didn't mind a bit. Friends sent her boxes of the stuff from America or she would go browsing in charity shops looking for the best bargain pieces. When one of her sons left home, she afforded herself the luxury of her latest creation, a Teddy Bear room. An entire bedroom full of teddies, sitting on a teddy bedspread (tedspread?), with teddy pillows, light streaming in when she opened teddy curtains. She liked her bears. She loved her family.
Text messaging took on new meaning over those days. You stopped worrying about the right thing to say and as the days went by, you wrote, "I'm here for you, xx" or "I love you" or 'I'm thinking of you all, x" and it didn't feel corny, it felt right. "You don't have to reply" I'd write and he wouldn't. But one time he replied with a simple x and I cried just looking at it.
Last night he phoned me with the news, his voice calm, telling me to take care of myself, to have a brandy, to remember her the way she was when she cooked a chicken curry for me a few weeks before. Amazing, the way he was trying to comfort me. He said to tell people not to send flowers but to give blood in her memory instead. He said this a few times. Over those days he had seen the hope blood could create when everything was hopeless, hope that the cells in what he called this "magical elixir" might kick-start her system again, hope that she would be given a bit more time. Never mind the shortage of beds, nurses told him. We need blood.
We are so fond in this country of giving out yards about the health service and yet only six per cent of us donate blood to help the health service we profess to care so much about. Some of us are afraid of the needles. Some of us think, wrongly, we might catch something. Some of us are certain that enough other people doing it. But enough people simply are not doing it. Not nearly enough.
When I put the phone down I sat looking for a while at the small candle I had lit on the widescreen TV. A strange kind of altar. O'Sullivan beating Hendry. A glass of brandy. Cheap chocolate. Three remote controls. No control. A deathly silence, the commentator says, in the Crucible. And on my phone an eloquent x that I never want to erase.
For more information on donating blood call the lo-call Donor Info line on 1850-731137