PHONOPHOBIA CONQUERED

Dick Pountain/10 July 2001/14:44/Idealog 84

It could easily have been a shoot for an up-market mobile phone advert. We landed at Pisa airport around 9pm out of the sort of louring, lead-grey sky that can only mean an intense thunderstorm is approaching. Having ascertained that the next train to Florence was at 10.30 (and from Pisa Centrale, not Airport) we joined the taxi queue just as the huge drops started to fall. There were of course no taxis: or more precisely they arrived singly at roughly 10-minute intervals. By the time four or five had been and gone we were down to third place in the queue, behind a pretty young woman and a casual young man with a serious-looking black briefcase. Suddenly the woman asked the three of us if we'd like to share a taxi all the way to Florence, instead of the railway station. We had already realized that we were not going to get to our final destination that night, and preferred our chances of finding a bed in Florence to Pisa, so we gladly accepted. The thunderstorm broke into slashing rain, the sun went down, orange like distant blast furnaces but topped with a jet-black lid of thunderclouds - and all across the horizon huge, trees of purple forked lightning flashed, two or three times every minute. Forget mobile phone ad, think Lord of the Rings, Gates of Mordor.

The young woman turned out to be an English clothes designer who visits clients' factories in Italy twice a month - and who turned out to live barely 100 yards from us in London. The young man turned out to be a Belgian astronomer, on his way to an observatory. He told us, as the lightning cracked either side of the motorway, that he had just helped to discover some lone stars that exist in the space between the galaxies. We all speculated what the night sky might look like from a planet orbiting such a star, and decided it would probably be less hostile than the one we had. On learning that we had nowhere to stay yet, the young woman hauled out a state-of-the-art Ericsson mobile, called her own hotel, and after three or four further calls we had a room reserved for the night.

At this point I crossed some sort of mental threshold and realized that, at last, I could see the point of owning a mobile phone. The next day we arrived in our remote Umbrian valley to be told by neighbours that in our absence a mast had been erected and that mobile reception was now at last possible in the valley, confirming my resolution to swallow my dislike of the things and get a mobile.It's not at all obvious why I've resisted the mobile phone revolution so long, nor why I am still slightly reluctant to join. It's not as if I'm a technophobe, as I must have been one of the first four or five people in the country to get a Palm Pilot. I suppose there may be a genetic/environmental component, since my father loathed the telephone and refused to have one in the house for many years, feeling it was an invasion of his privacy: I do still often swear aloud if the phone rings while I'm frying an egg or making toast, but a mobile might help rather than hinder that.

Then there is of course the aesthetic argument. Griping about people on trains shouting 'I'm on the train' into their mobile has become a staple cliche for newspaper columnists, while without question those damnable downloadable ringing tones that everyone now sports are the worst offence against musicality since Rolf Harris and the Stylophone. And it does very little for your love of humanity when some mad-haired, shorts-wearing person careens toward you barking into an invisible headset about 'see you at Burning Man then...'

There's a philosophical/sociological argument that feels briefly plausible - that mobiles erode the last vestiges of citizenly feeling by enabling you to talk to your remote friends all day while completely ignoring the people around you. However there's a grave danger of slipping into fogeyism here: the under-twenties I know who have grown up with the mobile seem pretty unharmed by the experience, and even appear to form wider and stronger friendships as a result of it. And perhaps therein lies the heart of my problem, namely that I'm of a generation that valued intimacy in a different way and is terribly careful to balance it against privacy. On the few occasions that my partner or I travel abroad separately, neither feels any need whatsoever to tell the other that we are on the plane, or that the plane has just landed: the two contradictory/complementary maxims 'Absence makes the heart grow fonder' and 'Out of sight, out of mind' apply.

And there we have it: I neither need nor want people phoning me whenever and wherever. I do very little freelance work nowadays and have little desire to browse the Web, read books or watch movies on a mobile. I would like to be able to book hotel rooms from the back of a taxi once in a while, and even send an emergency email if I had to, but most of all I want to autodial numbers from exactly the same address book as on my desktop PC. In short I want a plain Palm Pilot with a GSM phone right inside it (not strapped on its back or stuffed up its bottom) and I can't quite understand why it is taking so long to arrive.