I AM WALKING down the street complaining about my phone to my mother. “I never thought that I could despise a phone more than I despised my last phone,” I say before adding in tribute to poor Gordon Brown: “Stupid, bigoted phone.”
My mother is pushing the pram and pretending to listen to me. She never lets me push the pram when we are out together. Claims it helps her walk better. But we both know the real reason. Nobody wants to be the non-pram pusher in a walking twosome. You feel kind of redundant walking idly beside an industrious-looking person who is pushing a pram.
It’s also harder work for the non-pusher. The mother fairly trots along when she gets behind the wheels. I try to steal the pram from her at the traffic lights, to no avail. For an oul’ one, she has a grip like a python.
So I am being mean about the phone and she is pretending to listen to me – I know this because she has a distant look in her eyes. It’s the look she gets when she is mentally preparing the next escapade she is going to write about in her blog. I’d tell you the address of her blog, except that would constitute an extreme case of what I like to call Feeding The Monster.
It is bad enough already. I’ve become more cautious during our chats, worried that my confidences will end up on her blog. “What? You’ve some cheek,” she sniffs. When I ring her up for important information such as how she gets the crust on her oven-baked rice pudding so crispy, or how much Calpol constitutes an illegal dose, she has taken to saying she can’t talk because she is busy, and I quote, “writing things on my blog”.
Reader, she has six readers. And two of them are asleep in the pram she is holding onto for dear life. At the makey-up naming ceremony we had a couple of weeks ago, she spent most of her speech, which was supposed to be about her newest grandchildren, talking about “my blog”.
She is also on Faceache. Sometimes I say, “I had a great night out last night” and she says, “I know, your red dress looked lovely but you could have got your hair done”. Some people, you know who you are, have a habit of posting pictures online before a person’s hangover even has a chance to develop.
Even as I am bitching about my phone, I feel guilty because it was a very generous gift. And there’s nothing actually wrong with the phone per se. It’s just me. So-called “touch phone technology” doesn’t seem to work with my fingers. I touch a button to send a text message and I get some kind of map showing me the view from outerspace. It’s not an iPhone, this new phone, it’s another type of mobile that tries to fool you into thinking you are iCool because you can touch the screen instead of old school buttons, when really you just look like an iMoron poking at the thing to no avail, all day.
At least I knew where I was with the old phone which had proper buttons even if some of them didn’t work. It had stopped letting me know the identity of the person texting me and when I tried to reply to the mystery texter it laughed in my face, so I pretty much stopped texting except in emergencies. But this new phone is worse. It’s the kind of phone that makes out it has the answers to the world’s social and economic ills, when actually it is just shiny and really, really posh. Sort of like David Cameron.
“I hate this phone,” I say and then I take a call. I am standing on a corner chatting away when a young man riding a bike comes up behind me and tries to take it out of my hand. I hold the phone fast, but he has the momentum of the bike in his favour and while I reach out to grab the elastic of his grubby tracksuit bottoms he wrests the phone from my hand and cycles off down the road.
I turn to my mother and burst into tears. “But you said you hated it,” she says. “And you are always cosmically ordering things from ‘The Universe’ – rolls eyes – like parking spaces and lost keys. So you must have subconsciously asked ‘The Universe’ – rolls eyes, again – to take your phone so that you could go back to using the old one which you don’t seem to hate as much as you thought.”
“That’s so not the point, mother,” I say. “I’ve just been robbed. By a boy. On a bike. In broad daylight. There’s nothing cosmic about it.”
And then I say: “You better not write about this on your blog.” roisin@irishtimes.com
THIS WEEKEND: Róisín will be a football widow when Portadown take on Linfield in the Irish Cup final, which apparently is very important. On the upside she will be having afternoon tea in Portadown's Yellow Door deli which is like the Avoca of the North, with even more varieties of scone.