Immobile

Last weekend we travelled to Wellington, something we do often. You’d think by now it would be a seamless operation, a casual chucking-in-the-car of a couple of bags and a couple of people but it’s not. Okay, it’s easier than when we did it only a couple of times a year and had to close up the house, turn off the water, etc, but the drawback (yes, I know it’s a privileged first-world problem) to living between two places is that you can bet the thing you wanted to use/wear/eat is often in the other place when you want to use/wear/eat it. Therefore we both have – on our phones, because we’re twenty-first century people – a list of things we don’t want to forget to transport with us.

On Sunday we were less than an hour from Wellington when I dug my hand in my bag for my phone to text someone; it touched nothing but the soft inside of the pocket cleverly designed to fit a mobile phone. I sighed and dug deeper – often said phone misses its own little pocket to explore the bottom of the bag, in the process getting scratched by a key or the zip on my wallet. I found the keys, the wallet, a tube of hand sanitiser, my notebook, a couple of tissues and a hairband. What I didn’t find was a phone.

My brain went dull for a few seconds, then into panicked overdrive as I – relatively calmly, I think – said: ‘I’ve left my phone.’

‘No!’ said Neil, his contradiction more one of disbelief than hope.

My subsequent swearing confirmed my stupidity rather than an inaccurate statement. ‘What am I going to do?’ I almost wailed. On my phone is my diary, various lists, reminder notes, not to mention that it’s the only method I have of communication with most people. Neil reminded me that, thanks to a cloud that has nothing to do with rain, the former of those items is mirrored on my ipad. True, but I wouldn’t be happy walking around the supermarket referring to an ipad for my shopping list, and it’s useless as a phone. It says nothing for my lack of vanity that one of my biggest concerns was being unable to respond to a text reminder about my upcoming pedicure appointment, meaning the salon might give it away to someone else and I’d have to spend the next few weeks of (hopefully) summer with untidy toes. And what if my brother was trying to get hold of me because something happened with Dad?

I didn’t think about it until I started to write this but now I realise I’ve had a mobile phone for over half my life, a frightening thought. I worked peripatetically when I met Neil and, mere months into our relationship, I was working in a small village and the hotel was deep in the countryside a few miles away. It was January and the world had whitened as I’d driven north earlier in the day so all I saw as I turned away from streetlights to drive to the hotel after work were two dark lines moving away from me into white nothingness. Driving in snow and ice didn’t bother me – a few weeks after passing my test, roughly a decade earlier, snow had landed and stuck around for a couple of months, a trial by the opposite of fire, if you like – and I arrived at the hotel with no issue other than a slight worry of how to get across the ice rink of a car park in high heels. (Answer, if you’re interested, is to slither to the boot of the car and rummage in your bag until you find your trainers, then perform balletic miracles to swap shoes without touching the filthy car bumper or slipping over on the ice as you balance on one foot.)

In the manner of telling an amusing story I related all this to Neil, not considering that he had grown up in the milder south and wasn’t used to seeing ice and snow that often, let alone driving across remote moors in either. He was apoplectic, muttering all sorts of terrors both against my employers (also his, incidentally) and of what could have happened, the latter involving me freezing to death in the middle of nowhere after being stranded in a blizzard. That weekend he arrived in Sheffield with extra weight, a small brick with a section that flipped open to reveal numbers and a tiny screen, one of the earlier mobile phones that didn’t require a larger brick to be carried around with it to keep it charged. I protested but, in the end and to keep the peace, agreed to always carry it. At least I saved on gym membership, although a colleague nearly gave himself a hernia when he picked my bag up one day (What the f**k have you got in here?!) I never had to use it to call for help.

Further thinking and I realise that for at least a couple of decades I never carried my phone religiously, leaving it at home if I went out for a walk or grocery shopping, only taking it when I was driving in case of emergency. Until 2020. That’s when, like the rest of the country, I had to use the tracer app to record my movements (it being compulsory in New Zealand for a time). Since then it’s become an almost permanent appendage and not having it made me realise how much I’ve come to depend on it always being there, whether it’s to call someone to actually talk or, much more frequently, for the many other things I use it for.

But, you know what? I managed. I borrowed Neil’s phone to send a few texts (despite his grumbles that he was getting more messages to pass onto me than he was for himself) and used my ipad for messages to those of my friends sensible enough to have an Apple device. It was a little discombobulating the couple of times I needed to make a phone call and realised I couldn’t (we have no landline) and I had a slight worry that the call to offer me a medical appointment I’ve been waiting months for would show as a missed call when I got it back, (it didn’t) but I coped. It actually felt like a small adventure (I lead a boring life) to be out on my own with no device back-up in case of emergency, much like the first few decades of my life. Still, I’m glad to have it back, even if it is only so I can add to my list of things not to forget when we move between houses: Take phone.

A special mention for the lovely Jenny and her lovely daughter, Claudia, the former who liberated my phone from the kitchen benchtop where I’d left it, the latter who was driving to Wellington a couple of days later and delivered it to me.