THE BBC used to have a huge variety of recordings of the sound of different ambiences, which it used to cover gaps and jumps in sound tracks. Dawn in a Suburban Garden did for most outdoors situations and there was Street Sound, One and Street Sound, Two and so on, almost to infinity.
It must have re recorded them recently because there are at least two new sounds on streets. One is the peremptory "parp" of remotely controlled car alarms being switched on and off the other is the frilly trill of the mobile phone.
I might be withdrawing my own contribution to this urban symphony soon. I've never had a car alarm, but I got a mobile phone recently. I don't know whether to keep it. The reason is that I looked at my Eircell account for the last two month period. During this time I only carried the phone on a total of five days - three in London and two in Westport. There are approximately 55 separate calls itemised on the bill. Of these, only seven refer to times I actually talked to human beings.
I talked for a total of 22 minutes between Ireland and London and a total of nine minutes in Ireland. All the other charges are either me ringing up numbers that weren't answered or people ringing me up and me not answering.
The bill came to £52.22 including VAT on the calls and on £10 worth of Eirtime - the name they have for rental. This means that the real telephone calls, where I communicated with, someone, came to about £7 each.
I was interested enough in this finding to check with Telecom what making these calls on an ordinary phone would cost. The 22 minutes to England would have cost £6.38; The nine minutes to Westport would have cost £1.98. Throw in rental on an ordinary phone and VAT and the whole thing would have come out at £23.86 as opposed to £52.22.
This disparity is so great - my mobile phone which I thought of as "free" because I got the actual instrument free from the Automobile Association - turns out to be so expensive, even when minimally used, that I'm very understandably rethinking my telephonic position.
I may have got things a bit wrong, of course. I don't usually check bills, especially when, as with the Eircell one, I'm paying by direct debit, so the payment is going through anyway and it would be a hassle to query anything. But, roughly speaking, I think I'm correct. Using a mobile phone is not, as I had thought, about as costly as having an extra phone line. Specifically, the extra line was for the car.
THE AA offered the free phone because you can attach it to the cigarette lighter bit in your car (if you have such a thing: they're an amazing anachronism) and when your car breaks down you can ring up the AA. My car does break down. I had to get the AA man three times in December. It is a fact of life that when cars break down they are always on a featureless stretch of road about four miles from Kilbeggan in a rainstorm; the nearest house is full of howling Alsatians and won't answer the door; and the public phone when you get to it is vandalised.
I did a sum in my head - if the mobile cost me about £150 a year to run, that would be cheaper than anything I could do to improve the car. The words "gearbox" and "£800" have been used in connection with the car. Better by far to ring the super efficient AA and just try to struggle on, but it may turn out that a gearbox would be cheaper.
This is not Eircell's fault - it is mine, or rather, the modern world's because I wasn't content to keep the instrument in the car. In fact, I never discovered how to attach it to the cigarette thing. I kept the phone in the house and fed its battery with electricity all night and then cossetted it, so it wouldn't leak out all that energy. I like it. It's a smart looking thing, in AA yellow and black, and I like possessing it. I haven't known how to use it - I took it to Bulgaria without knowing its PIN number, and I only found out recently that it stores messages. Still, I get a kick out of having it, and also a vague feeling of security.
I don't need it in the strict sense, I just want it, because if I analyse where I was when I ran up my £52 bill - in London I was in a hotel room in Camden Town with a perfectly good phone extension in it, and in Westport I was in a B & B with the same - I didn't need a mobile at all.
IN assessing whether or not to run the mobile, I include as a factor that the phone, like the automobile, has added a dimension to our personal liberty. It is easier to live a double for triple life, for instance, than it used to be - much more easy to lie. On the other hand, the specifics of place mean much less. Just as your car seals you in a bubble of yourself, the mobile seals you in an invisible telephone box, no matter where you go.
You don't have to defer to the reality of whatever is around you - that you are on top of a mountain or in the middle of a desert or on an island (the Aran Islands, indeed, have exceptionally good transmission, as the result of a deliberate policy). The mobile phone changes the position of the individual in the environment, and changes the individual's position vis a vis other individuals - witness conversations brutally interrupted - and even changes the individual's relationship with the self. That rapt stance, for instance, that you see in men leaning against trees or pausing in doorways, talking into their little phones - you otherwise see that self forgetfulness only when they're absorbed in watching sport.
Women take on a male briskness when they're talking on a mobile. These shifts of style are part of the texture of the world that is here and that is coming into being not to note them leaves you in the past, or old before your time.
But to be charged 16p for a local call that never connected because you forgot to put in the prefix ... 35p for a call of zero duration ... 15p to hear you have no messages .. . 37p for a five second call from Westport to Dublin - these seem to me high prices to pay for being at the philosophical cutting edge.
I rang Eircell, of course, to try to clarify matters. Two separate pleasant young women said they couldn't really explain all the call charges, and offered to scrub different little bits of the bill.
One said the man who could explain charging would ring me back. He didn't in the following four hours, so I still don't understand the principle of a mobile phone bill. However, it turns out that there's no hurry because I did discover that the initial contract with Eircell is for a minimum of a year, so I have to pay rental anyway for the rest of that. So I'll be keeping the phone, at least till the contract is up.
I suppose the thing to do is use it very sparingly. Apart from that - please don't ring me unless you know I'm there. I can't afford all this not talking to people.