Iphone

Ask any estate agent: most potential house buyers arrive with a detailed list of criteria for their new home, only to end up buying a property which meets almost none of them. The same is true of dating – few of us are married to people chosen on the basis of an initial checklist. Henry VIII tried this approach and it didn’t turn out well. You could dismiss this as mere whimsicality. However, the seeming messiness of such decision-making – the fact we refine our preferences in response to what we find available – is what makes consumer capitalism much more innovative than the faux-rational capitalism practised by large organisations. By demanding a problem be defined precisely and inflexibly before you are allowed to solve it, you close the door to more creative solutions.

As I sat down to dinner in a lovely old country pub my reservation was cancelled by my iPhone, which was having a tantrum. The owner of this restaurant was serving us with a smile, we had been shown to our table, drinks and menus had been brought. But the buzzing lump of metal in my bag was adamant this was not happening. My iPhone had packaged up a montage surprise, complete with a replay of our private conversation I was experiencing one of those moments where reality splits into two: the one you are experiencing and the one your phone claims you are. A lot of people obediently accept the phone’s version no matter what. This is presumably why drivers follow their satnavs into garden walls, or swerve along the motorway looking at pictures of dogs on Facebook.

The girl wound down her window, stuck her mobile phone out into midair, and started to take pictures of the sun. I was behind her Mini on the southbound slip road off the A3 to the Cobham roundabout. On the left was the backed-up turn for Hersham down the Seven Hills Road which is always busy in the morning. I was queueing in the less busy right hand lane to go around the roundabout to Cobham to do the horses. It should not have taken me long, even at 8 a.m. But the woman in the cream Mini in front of me was busy with her phone pointed up into the sky at a sun so blazing it was impossible to look anywhere near it. What she captured I have no idea. It’s hard to think of anything more pointless than trying to photograph a blinding heat haze.

‘Can I ask you why you don’t want a smart phone?’ said the chirpy manager, as I stood blinking in front of him in the intensely red Vodafone shop. I took my iPhone out of my bag and explained that I wanted a second phone with no brain whatsoever. A stupid, backward phone was what I wanted. Not a scheming, conniving monster like this one. And I said this quietly, so that my iPhone didn’t hear me, because that is how frightened I am of it. ‘Ah!’ said the pin-striped tech wizard, as if he had heard of this situation before, or perhaps increasingly. Reaching for the bottom shelf, he told me there was only one such phone in his shop. He put a tiny, plastic Nokia in my hands. It was so basic it was as light as a feather. I said that would do fine.