Look at you with your big shoes and your empty wallet. How do you pay for things? With your phone? Your watch? Don’t talk to me about witchcraft, sonny, I was around when Timmy Mallet had a music career.
Recycling; you take something old and you turn it into something new. It’s how the world works now and I wouldn’t change it for anything. I would much rather take the rambling notes of a semi-drunk Ian trying to remember an idea from over ten years ago (vanillla scapegoat, shoulder frog bags, ultra finger groups?) and turn it into a leaflet advertising the many talents of a local spiritual healer. Think of the tens of people who would benefit from my sacrifice. It’s a win win for the world.
When I was back visiting my family for belated birthday proceedings I took to the loft in her house to dig out the last of my junk that is cluttering the place up in the hope of either getting rid of it or taking it with me back to Newcastle. What I unearthed will probably form the majority of my posts for next month because December is a busy month. It’s time to phone it in (no pun intended).
I present to you Bob, my very first mobile phone:
Purchased for a mere £30.00 from (I think) an O2 store at the White Rose Shopping Centre circa 1999/2000, I initially refused to get one on the grounds that everyone else was and I didn’t want to be lumped in with the zeitgeist. Whatever it was that made me change my mind is lost to time. Perhaps it was the whopping ten (count ’em) text messages the internal battery of the phone could hold or the two lines of text visible on the 3cm by 1cm screen. Maybe it was the robust handset that, even in my tiny hands, feels as though you could crack open a tin of beans with it.
I am confident that this little wild cherry will be worth a lot of money in the future as over twenty years later it is still dripping with sex and style, much like yours truly. Once I start strutting my stuff down at da club, when I be all up at da club, waving this honey sausage around like a pair of electrics socks (?) I’ll be a local celebrity.
I am Future Retro.
9 comments on “The Past – Simple and Chunky”
Simple and chunky. That’s a mantra to live by.
Are you bringing this phone back into service to replace your Windows Phone? I hear it has almost the same functionality.
Since picking it up again I’ve been… fucking about with it to make it work and I can’t. I reckon if I keep… fucking about with it I’ll be Rolls Royce.
My mum had that phone, so you are in great company on the style front.
What a silent zinger that was, a stealth zing. It came out of nowhere and got me right between the eyes. We’ll done, sir.
My first phone had a sliding cover over the buttons and had “WAP” internet access. That meant you could pay 10p a minute to access a terrible version of the internet on a screen that was smaller and less versatile than the ones you get on a vending machine.
That’s a fairly exciting deal. I can imagine you looked up a lot of roads on that phone when you were younger.
I tried but there weren’t any. I seem to remember that most of what I could access was directly provided by BT Cellnet, and was things like a weather report generalised to cover the whole UK, and a few news stories summarised into a single sentence.
I was re-watching the first series of ‘Black Books’ and the second episode where the students come in and Bernard smashes the phone, that was this / my phone.
Now THAT’S a claim to fame!
It’s not as good as the one where he cuts the phone cord with scissors but it’s still good.