Well, we all knew it would come to this, and come to this it has. My beautiful, beloved, infinitely sweet mobile phone has, shock horror, died. This happened a couple of weeks ago… I am only now able to speak about the grief which I have endured.

My phone had been in palliative care at any rate… the reception was terrible, the text messaging and other basic functions lessening in reliability. And then, sadly, the real deterioration began. It would not let anybody hear me when they called, nor when I called them. The battery was dying more and more regularly. My phone’s time had come.

So what have I done? Now that my adored mobile phone has abandoned me? I have scrabbled around in the top of dad’s wardrobe, of course. I have emerged with the original Nokia. I have placed my sim card in this brick …phone, I mean to say. I am lugging it around with me. It is very hard for me to go from a phone the size of a tictac container with an aerial to one the size of, well, my cordless phone at home. Which is small for a cordless phone, to be sure, but large for a mobile.

Unfortunately, what I have discovered is this: I am enjoying the large buttons. I am enjoying the rather greatly improved reception. I am enjoying the increased volume. I am enjoying being heard when I ring people.

All I can say is; as much as my greatly missed phone exceeded the current one in basic aesthetics, the useability of this one is massively superior. And this is a really, really old Nokia. As in, it still has that version of snake where you can’t go through the walls. Oh yes. This is ancient. What does this mean? What does this all MEAN?

It means, despite the fact that Panasonic are now making an equally tiny A210 or something, basically a hotted-up version of my weeny A100, which can FLASH in different PATTERNS according to caller ID, I will not be buying that phone. No indeed. I will by buying a different, more practical phone.

Possibly a Nokia, possibly not, but definitely not a Panasonic.

So what does it signify, that I will be buying a practical phone? Rather than one that is literally the size of an eraser? It means, boys and girls, that I am now, officially, OLD. I really am. On Wednesday of next week I shall be twenty.

Before I could at least claim to be young at heart, but now I am buying a practical phone I no longer can. After much internal debate I have decided I will get a practical phone in an outlandish colour, or at least an outlandishly coloured cover, so that I am neither an old fogey nor the owner of a highly useless and impractical phone.

So I do hope you have all purchased me slightly outlandish but not completely impractical gifts for my birthday. *raises eyebrows* Good. That’s what I like to hear.