Survival

I am very fond of my old mobile phone, and joke that it only has a black-and-white licence. In some senses I am too fond of it as when it went missing a couple of weeks ago I went completely frantic with the accompanying sense of disorientation. It turned out to be in a colleague’s house, wedged down the side of the chair I’d been sitting in.

On Spring Fair Day the phone went missing again. Partway through the afternoon I realised it wasn’t on me, so cycled home to check, thinking it was in the coat I’d worn in the morning, but no. Nor was it at church. As I made my way back to the field having concluded that it must have been in my bag after all, I spotted it lying by the side of the main road in a waterfilled gutter. It had obviously dropped out of my pocket. The phone was very unhappy, with water sloshing around behind the screen, which could have been an interesting visual effect had it actually been designed like that.

The SIM card was undamaged so I simply took the phone apart and popped it in the boiler cupboard; by the end of Sunday it was completely dried out and ready to use again. Try that with your smartphone.