I’m writing this in the embarrassing little gap between Christmas and New Year. Somebody once described this week-long period as being ‘the armpit of the year”, but I, personally, prefer to call it the barse, because it’s like that embarrassing little gap between your balls and your arse, simply because it holds no useful or obvious value whatsoever. There’s nothing to do. All of the good TV seems to be on before 3pm, which, given that I tend to rise 4 or 5 means that the only entertainment I’m left with is a slightly random DVD that someone gave me. And please believe me when I tell you that there’s only so many times you can watch the black & white masterpiece of Pierrepoint: Britain’s Last Hangman before the festive spirit leaves you entirely.

This time of year is usually filled with three things; ruminating over the year just gone, or plotting schemes for the year to come, or, my personal favourite, just going to lots of parties and getting a bit smashed. It’s a good time for drinking, given that people are in the mood to let their hair down, and because there’s far more booze around than normal, and also because this week of the year has a strange, confusing effect on peoples’ memories. I put this epidemic of forgetfulness down to the same sort of end-of-year effect that happens with budgets, in that often companies & governments are too busy trying to spend every last penny of their yearly allocation before the calendar ticks over, and therefore aren’t actually too picky about where it goes. The practical upshot of this, for me, is that, once a party is in sufficient swing, I can get naked whilst playing Twister and yet nobody seems to remember anything about it. Least of all me.

Or this amnesia might be due to someone just putting rohypnol in the punch. Who knows. Either way, getting drunk at parties certainly helps the one tradition that I’m sure we all dread, to various extents – which is being button-holed by someone that wants some advice about mobile phones.

Doctors always complain about this. Doctors always, always whinge about the fact that they get collared at any & every social event by people they vaguely know who want to tell them, over a drink, every little thing about their barse-pox, if only because parties have more twiglets & olives than the average common-or-garden waiting-room, and are therefore more attractive a choice of venue for such a conversation than their local GUM clinic (actually, mine does have olives, but only black ones, which I despise). But, then again, doctors get paid six figures a year (that’s a whole seven figures more than me, by the way) and as such their bleatings can be safely ignored. What you cannot ignore, alas, is the way that this disease has moved on, in the last few years, to infect anyone who has more of a clue than most about mobiles.

We’ve all been there. You’re at a do, having a drink, meeting new people, and someone you’re talking to picks up on the fact that, when it comes to mobiles, you know what you’re talking about. ‘Aaaah,” they’ll say. ‘Aaaah, that’s funny, I was just thinking about buying an iPhone / changing networks / setting a handset battery on fire and then sitting on it. Do you think that’s a good idea?”.

And they’ll look up at you, as if they’re expecting you to be glad about the fact that they’ve been magnanimous & thoughtful enough to let you bless them with your knowledge. The graceless berks! You’re at a party! You’re at a social event! You don’t want to spend the precious five minutes between you turning up & you stripping off to play Twister eroded by banal & pointless questions about which fecking website it’s best to buy handsets from. If you’re an expert about industrial carpeting, you don’t have people at a drinks-do waddle up to you and say ‘Aaaah, I’ve been thinking about getting a new carpet, but does Lux-Pile Ltd. get better coverage where I live than WeaveCo, Inc.?”. And anyway, if they did do that then you would be perfectly justified in smashing a bottle on a table-top and then flensing their wind-pipe out of their neck like a fleshy bit of calamari. In fact, there isn’t a court in the land that would convict you. So what is it that makes such boring behaviour socially valid when it comes to telephones…?

Tsk. My usual tactic in such situations is just to say, with rather forced bonhomie, ‘Well, just don’t by an LG, they might just blow up!” which gives me an opportunity to give them a short coroner’s report of that poor Korean chap that got his ribcage caved in when his phone went pop, all of which, if done with sufficient gore, will make them go away to be quietly sick in the corner, thus leaving me in peace. The grim and maddening irony of all of this is that the best bloody party of 2007 that I went to was deliberately, purely, wonderfully dedicated to nothing but people who wanted to talk about the mobile industry, and that was the SMS Text News drinks-bash in London. I was sick in the corner that night myself, but only out of overpowering envy at some of the kit that was being bandied about.

Anyway. I would give you one or two more tips about how to deflect such irritants over the holiday season (‘Ah, I’m a bit behind, they wouldn’t let us have mobile phones in prison, see” being another favourite of mine), but alas, I’m fresh out of time – my ferry back to the mainland leaves in…
Oh dear. It really does leave very soon. And I must, must catch it, because my signal here alternates – depending on factors such as barometric pressure, and the number of seagulls in the sky – between Vodafone IE and Vodafone UK and it’s doing my nut in. Civilisation beckons. And I believe there is a saying about time, tide or bastard ferry-captain waiting for no man, so I must be leaving.

Happy new year, boys and girls.

Aaaaaah…Christmas. Time of too much food, too much booze, and, if you’re as clueless as me when it comes to chemistry, too much throwing-up as you try to settle your poor, bloated tummy with ten rennies washed down with vinegar. Christmas revolves around three things, traditionally – gluttony, watching television and touching base with family.

And it’s the family-thing that’s got me in my current mess.

I write this, dear reader, not ensconced in the comfort & stability of my usual kicking ground (the south of England) but instead from my dad’s house, which is uncomfortable, unstable and perched rather precariously a few feet from the raging, black torrents of the Atlantic Ocean, on an island off of the West Coast of Scotland.

The thing is, you see, I don’t really get to see the dear old buffer that often, and so it tends to be the case that either me or my brother will wander up and keep him company for Christmas. This year it was my turn to make the 650-mile trek, and so although filled with the smug warmth of a duty honourably executed I am also frozen by the local temperature, which would be quite warm, were it not for the wind-chill, which is such that if you look directly into the wind your eyes will ice-over, cracking and shrinking until they become the same size & texture of those little baubles of bubble-gum they used to put at the bottom of screwball ice-cream cones. You know the ones I mean; the most delicious way to choke to death, as a child…

Anyway, I’ve been on the island for all of 20 hours, now, which is actually a little less time than it takes to get here. The most amusing leg of the trip is the National Express link to the ferry port, a strange and humbling experience that always feels like entering some foreign country. In fact, it’s exactly like a foreign country – the toilets are awful, the customs & morals are at odds with your own and everyone’s speaking a language you can’t understand (I counted Spanish, Polish and, most unintelligible of all, Glaswegian).

One thing that did make me giggle, though, was a little transfer stuck to the window that encouraged passengers to SMS their comments about the trip into a shortcode. However, a couple of hours down the road – jinking around a loch – when I was about to punt off a text critiquing the driver’s body-odour, this giggle rapidly dried into a rolling gurgle of shock when the three most horrid, damning & generally disastrous words that the world has ever thrown at me plopped onto my screen. And, oh, they were bad words. More frightening that ‘you’re fired, Harvey”. More anguishing than ‘I’m leaving you”. More generally life-changing than ‘I love you” and more intrinsically mind-shaking than ‘Pregnant. Triplets. Yours.” And those three fell words were:

NO NETWORK COVERAGE.

My heart responded to the facts of the matter quicker than my brain did, by ramping up my BPMs to about 120 and generally laying down a lot of blood-oxygen to see me through this dire, unspeakable trauma. My adrenal glands were next to cotton-on, squirting out liquid-panic from my kidneys in the same sort of quantities, in terms of fluid-ounceage, as your average Slag & Legless happy-hour cocktail-bucket. This flight-or-fight response would normally come in inordinately useful, were it not for the fact that I was currently penned into a coach-seat that Tom Cruise would’ve had trouble squeezing himself into (legend has it that, in order to fit more passengers on busses, National Express tracked down that serial-killer who crammed all of his corpses into suitcases and promptly hired him as vice-president in charge of revenue).

So I’m sat there going just a little nuts. You expect to lose coverage on two occasions, and two occasions only – when you’re underground, or when you’re in a plane. For it to happen unexpectedly is…well. Unexpected. For it to happen when you’re a self-confessed phonaphilliac like me is hideously jarring, doubly so when you’re being boiled alive by the furnace-like heaters in a wheeled sardine-can, and you really, really need to text a mate to get advice on how to deal with the fact that you appear to be sat next to the Crack Fox from the Mighty Boosh.

So that was fun. It only lasted ten minutes or so, and the relief that returned as the signal-bars did was delicious in itself, but now, alas, it’s a permanent state of affairs. Or, rather, near-permanent. The island I’m on, you see, has coverage – like my winter beard – best described as ‘patchy”. And the fishing-village where my dad’s retired up to is in a dip, the same granite cove that protects it from the rage of the sea doing a similarly good job at protecting it from the modern inconvenience of functioning mobiles.

So my poor little phone is just sat here, forlornly, like a puppet with its strings cut. The fact that circumstance & distance has reduced this little jewel of modern technology to nothing more than a paperweight is almost absurd – the reason it’s not totally, utterly, complete absurd is because, in a fiendishly cruel twist of fate, the signal here does, about twice a day, get through. And all of a sudden I can inhale communication & correspondence like a drowning swimmer inhales air; it’s not what you need, and it’s not enough to keep you going, but you’re not exactly going to turn it down, either.

Why the signal is so frustratingly fickle I have no idea. Twice-daily slots of coverage would logically be connected to the tides – do radio-waves bounce off water…? – but the timings keep changing. Perhaps it’s a combination of water and cloud, skipping just enough wattage out to me to function. Maybe it’s nothing to do with the weather, and in fact is more to do with one of the implausibly hairy cattle over here getting frisky with a cell-tower. My attempts to logically deduce the exact reasons for my tenuous links out to the rest of you have been just a little bit hampered by the extra fact that this island is, quite literally, the whisky-producing capital of the world. And since the one thing I like doing more than talking is drinking, I just hope that all you charming & wondrous people have a Christmas even half as merry as mine has been so far.

Happy Christmas, everyone. You’re my bhest friendsh!

Somebody once said that there are three types of people in this world: those that can count, and those that can’t. I disagree – there are only two types of people; people that are good with money, and people like me, who are comically hopeless.

It’s a disease I’ve had my whole life and it’s a disease that will probably kill me, or, rather, would probably kill me, if I could afford a funeral, or indeed the coroner needed to declare me dead (properly dead, mind, not just lurking in Panama for the insurance). It’s a mental thing; everyone alive has a slight blind-spot in their heads, the thing being that you can’t see your own one, and can only snigger at other peoples’, be it the fact they actually hold their drink or their self-deluding belief that they can sing. I’m the same, except that instead of being oblivious to my karaoke-attempts boiling the bladders of everyone within earshot I actually live in a fantasy dream-world where the ebbs & flows of cash into & out of my various accounts won’t, at the end of the month, result in a net figure that looks like the sort of number physicists use to measure the most underfed & tiny of atoms.

Quite frankly, I’m glad, if only because I’m an irresponsible little tyke and – if I had any money – I would instantly spunk it all on fast women & beautiful cars instead of investing it as apparently you should, in shares and bonds and other things of which I am only even dimly aware of due to the fact that, once, as a small child, I played Monopoly. So at least I’m spared the burden of responsibility – and, also, the threatening telephone calls I get from pimps & car-dealers appeal to my desire to be the centre of attention. But although I may be hazy about the actual bottom-line I am always careful to be razor-sharp on the individual credits & debits themselves, which is why the bills I get are never quite as big a surprise as this one, a mobile bill for $85,000.

What is that, in real money, anyway? £40,000? My god. You could rent one hell of a fast woman for a lump of cash that big. You could even take a slow woman and, through cosmetic surgery, make her a few cup-sizes faster. Eighty five thousand dollars. That’s like winning the anti-lottery. Your front-door is the portal to the rest of the world in more ways than one, and we are – to a greater or lesser extent – all prepared, at some level, for hesitant knock of a policeman with tragic news (…or, if you’re me, the hammering of a policeman with pinching handcuffs, which is most unfair, because that girl *promised* she was 16…) but we always expect really, really bad news to come in human form, and not inside a brown envelope they’ve had to extend so that they could fit all the 0’s onto the end of the bill.

I wonder why it is that stories about outrageously-large mobile bills always get more press-coverage that those stories about monstrously big gas, water, or tax bills – why is it, of all the utilities we cough up for every month, that your mobile bill seems worthy of the most attention…? Perhaps it’s because it’s so linked to those parts of our lives that are either enjoyable or important, instead of just being the cost of having hot water, or a roof over our head, or the fashionable luxury of these newfangled electric ‘light bulbs”. Why do we all care so? Using some armchair-psychology, here, is it possible that we’re all a little afraid, ourselves, of whopping great-big bills? It’s not an uncommon situation, after all, to cut a call short just because – like copping off with someone in the back of a 2am taxi – you’ve always got one eye, figuratively, on the clock.
So, as other generations had fables about not playing with gypsies in the woods, will our modern fairytales end up to be about not playing StarCraft in the cybercafé whilst plumbing your net connection through your handset? No. Partly because it’s a difficult image to illustrate, and will therefore never end up in children’s books but mostly because people who play StarCraft in the first place are rather less likely than most to ever have any children anyway.

As such, since salutary lessons on not being bankrupted by your network make for such lame stories it is the case that the government has actually started allocating time in schools, so as to educate the yoof of today as to the dangers of racking up vast charges, which I think to be a mistake, given that if they’re going to spend all their time downloading twatish ringtones with which to annoy the rest of us then they thoroughly deserve to have their juvenile little legs crushed by debt-collectors. It’s a win-win situation, actually, because the rest of us get a bit of peace & quiet and the debt-collectors have an easier time of it, since teenagers’ legs are far easier to break than those of adults (something to do with calcium deposits, apparently) and thus there’s less wear & tear on their sledgehammers.

Male sprogs, by the way, are even more susceptible than their female counterparts to running up bigger debts than their pocket-money can support, if only because they’re that much more likely to get a bit carried away when it comes to…adult content. This kid, for example, was offing himself so often that he offed himself. However, never fear – because there’s nothing you can do to challenge the biggest mobile bill of all time (pay attention, Ewan, because your own efforts are about to be dwarfed), which was for…

…and you must brace yourself, now…

$218,000,000,000,000. Equivalent to more than 17 times the GDP of the United States of America.

Two hundred and eighteen trillion dollars. Cheques made payable to Dr. Evil…

This week — or last week, to be exactly accurate — Ben is not entirely impressed with QR codes and constant change in the mobile industry. Over to Ben…

- – - –

The thing about things is, they change. Although this is not the first time I’ve started an article with a statement that wouldn’t sound out of place being slurred by a tramp – you can imagine him, pointing at you with his little blue bottle of turps – it is the first time I’ve felt obliged to explain what I mean. Things change, and always have done, and always will do. This causes problems for humans, who don’t like change, only ever really seeing it in negative terms. This is, after all, why they don’t call the buttfu*king of the planet we live on ‘Climate Crisis” or ‘Climate Emergency”. Change is bad, and universally understood to be so.

Fear not, though, because this is not going to be a vague missive about why we should all go out and be green and hug trees (at the eternal risk of wandering off the subject, I think it’s probably a bit late for that, and that we should actually all go out and nerve-gas everybody in the world [with the exception of you, me, the Impossibly Gorgeous Girl from Audit Services & someone else capable of making beer for the rest of us]) but instead is going to be a rather vague missive about why they keep trying to improve mobiles.

Because some of us rather like the way they are now.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that telephones were better when they were bakelite obelisks on people’s desks. I’m not saying that we should all still – as Alexander Graham Bell suggested – answer any & every call by saying ‘a-hoy hoy?”. I’m not a lover of the flat-world theory and I’m not proclaiming that things were better when bands wrote their own songs (though they were) or when we all did National Service (though they were) or when women didn’t have the vote (though they were). But what I am proposing, what I am supporting, is a view that once something’s already really, really, really good, do you absolutely have to try and keep ‘making it better?”.

Once something is 99% perfect then you should move on, and channel your enthusiasm to improve things in other areas where you can make sweeping progress, where it’s needed, instead of fart-arsing around rather pointlessly. The classic example of this is the Swiss Army Knife, a design that was pure genius until they tried ‘making it better” by adding more bits they thought we needed these days and ended up with this absolute monstrosity, which weights a kilo and could quite easily be used to stove in the skull of a charging hippopotamus (which is just as well, really, since running away would be impossible whilst encumbered with something this huge).

The point I’m trying – with my customary fecklessness – to make is that I’m a little worried that mobiles might be going the same way. Because, in these desperately modern times of ours, as there are less & less differences between price-plans, and less & less differences between networks generally, it’s more and more the case that it’s the bells & whistles on your handset that retailers tempt you in with. It started with the incorporation of cameras into phones, which was a perfectly logical step to make, but the trouble with taking perfectly logical steps is that you end up taking another, and then another, and whilst it all seems like a good idea at the time, pretty soon your logical feet have got logical blisters leaking logical pus all over the logical place.

Effectively it’s a problem that occurs when any area of endeavour suffers from a temporary glut of Big Ideas, and all of a sudden you’re forced to tweak instead of strive, rather like athletes who train their entire lives just to desperately try and shave another 0.0005 of a second off of the World Record when they could really be doing something slightly more useful, such as…well…anything, really, rather than mincing about in technicolour lycra. In the same vein, they’re now trying to…well. I’m not actually sure what they’re trying to do – so have a look for yourself.

Turning everyone’s handset into a portable scanner? To read little square barcodes, just so that a company can send you an advert? Why in the name of all that is desecrated and unholy would you want to do that…?

It’s the tail wagging the dog again. Strap me into a snugly-fitting canvas jacket, pop a tranquillising suppository up me and cart my spread-legged body off to the asylum if you think this is, perhaps, just slightly a controversial thing to say, but here we go: I don’t think we should be bending over backwards like this, just so that other feckless industries can turn mobiles into yet another way to spam people with adverts or ‘infotainment”. In fact, I think it’s taking the piss a bit.

So now’s as good a time as any to sit down, collectively, and have a bit of a think – we all do this with our own lives, every now and then, just to have a quick check on the status of things, and it might be healthy to just take stock. Where should mobiles go, what direction should they move in? They obviously shouldn’t be contaminated by this tacky crap, but should we allow our precious little toys to be fitted out with anything else at all…?

In a way it’s not really worthy getting wound up over, for two important reasons – the first is that, because of the way technology has a nasty habit of lurching out at you from nowhere, things change overnight and the whole picture shifts, so any pondering on the future of things is doomed to epic failure, rather like my attempts to impress the Impossibly Gorgeous Girl from Audit Services by using my previously fool-proof chat-up line about nerve-gassing billions of people. But the second is that, in the same way that change is bad, it’s also unstoppable, and to rail against it – no matter how much it annoys you – puts you right in the same league as King Canute in terms of general effectiveness. There is someone else, since Canute, that has tried to stop time moving, but he’s Michael Jackson, and you don’t really want to be associated with him, now, do you?

So I guess we’ll just have to put up with idiots for now. But if anyone wants to contribute to my nerve-gas fund, then just email me your bank details…

So mobiles have finally killed someone

About bloody time, I say..

I mean, god almighty – for ten, maybe fifteen years now we’ve all been shrugging off the spectre of mast-radiation, of brain-tumours in the same way that a duck shrugs off rain; it’s dull and it’s boring and, yet, it doesn’t do you the faintest bit of harm but – but but but – but it’s just a relief when it stops. When the superstitious nonsense stops and you can just get on with your life.

Or not, as the case may be.

It’s a little bit of a harsh way to go, I’ll admit, is having your mobile phone detonate to the extent that it drives shards of your own ribcage into your heart. It’s the unexpectedness that really makes it terrifying; your mobile lies alongside your Keys and Wallet to make up the Holy Trinity of your life, and the fact that it’s now the case that your phone can kill you stone dead is as unexpected as a doctor ringing you up to say ‘I’m terribly, terribly sorry, but we’ve had some test-results back and you’ve got a terminal case of Debitcarditis. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do”.

Modern Life – as Blur famously said – Is Rubbish. It’s rubbish for a lot of reasons (Cadburys Crème Eggs get smaller, bills get bigger, that sort of thing) but mostly it’s because, as time goes by, more & more things become dangerous. Cigarettes have gone, in the last twenty years, from being rather dashing to being utterly stupid. Booze has gone from being the amusing diversion of the many to being the last refuge of the jaundice-yellow few. Sex will get you diseased & dead quicker than sharing needles with the Elephant Man and now, it seems, even talking to your friends will break your heart in the most disgustingly literal way possible,

This is the trouble when you let anything into your life; when something becomes as familiar as furniture, that’s when you let your guard down. There are some things around you that you know are a hazard, but you make allowances for them, because the pleasure they give you outweighs the possibility of them suddenly turning nasty and ending your life; the fast drives in your car, all the flights you take, the rohypnol’d illegal immigrants that you have chained up in your love-dungeon. The thing – the nasty, horribly, desperately inevitable thing – about the law of averages is as follows; it catches up with you eventually.

And now, into the calculus of death, we now have to factor in our bloody mobiles! Will it never stop? What next? What’s next on the conveyor-belt of crap to worry about? Global Warming. Bird Flu. Marauding hordes of cannibals storming out of London to eat us all when the housing market finally admits it’s fucked & nobody’s able to afford food anymore. I don’t know about you lot but I’m a busy man, and I’m finding it harder and harder to schedule sufficient slots into my busy diary to sit down and really give these things the worry-time they all seems to deserve. This scheduling problem is compounded slightly by the fact that I daren’t actually check my calendar, given that my handset might go capriciously go pop and take my face off.

The irony of all of this is that phones have been exploding for years. And they’ve been killing people for years; the logic behind this is seductively self-explanational enough for me to lay it before you without any facts to back it up, and goes as follows – why, if you’re a government agency that wants to assassinate someone, go to the bother of training a sharpshooter, and then sending him to possibly get rumbled whilst waiting for a target that may never turn up? Why not, instead, just plant a few grams of semtex in the target’s mobile and then call them, whereupon he or she will – most obligingly – press the explosives directly to their own temple…? From the point of view of, say, MI6, this is perfect; it’s cheap, simple, effective and, if you’re caught, you can just blame LG.

Now, so far – as you may have noticed – I’ve been pitching this article as a substantially heartless flail at a mobile that appears to exploded, which is all fairly pointless, given that this is the first seemingly-verifiable case of a lethal phone out of all the 1.5 billion handsets that have ever been made. You’re over 100 times more likely to win the lottery than you are to have your own heart shucked out of your ribcage by a dodgy battery, so why the fuss? Well, dear reader, the fuss comes from the fact that all of this just highlights not the direct deaths, but the indirect deaths; the indirect maimings, the indirect danger that we’re put in every time we’re distracted or surprised by a call. Banning the use of non-hands-free phones whilst driving was the start of the government acknowledging this as a widespread problem, and there are upcoming changes to the UK’s legislation to ban the use of phones whilst crossing the road (in the Criminal Jaywalking Act 2008) and to ban the making calls to people whilst you’re sat on the can (in the Generally Ickky Justice Act 2009).

In the meantime, though the spectre of your mobile blowing chunks off of (or, indeed, in to) your fleshy, mortal, alarmingly-vulnerable little body is sure to inspire all sorts of impressionable idiots into holding their telephones out at arm’s length and bellowing into it because then – by their idiot logic – it’ll only take their fingers off. However, these are the conclusions of the sort of people who cook their hamburgers twice (so as to get rid of the BSE) and who check their horoscopes so that they can see exactly what’s going to happen to them that day (them, and one twelfth of the population). Hopefully this sort of person will be so worried about the situation that they’ll have a plain old-fashioned heart attack, thus raising the world’s average IQ by a small, but valuable, little bit.

In the meantime, the new challenges posed – in terms of staying alive – have been solved neatly by stowing my phone not in my shirt-pocket (close to some important organs) but instead in my trouser-pocket (close to the most important of organs). This then gives me an excuse to wear my cricket-box all the time, which adds a pleasant extra curvature to my form, and, let’s face it, men risk death & serious injury to impress women all the time anyway…

But when your number’s up, your number’s up…

Well, those ghastly little shoplifters, the Croatians, have done us in quite soundly. Having beaten us by one little goal they’ve deprived England of a place in Euro2008, effectively cancelling the bi-yearly festival of football & alcohol-abuse that graces this green & pleasant land. We’ll have to wait for the World Cup in 2010 until we can next have at crack at any tournament worth bothering with.

2010! Wasn’t that the year we were all meant to be living in giant greenhouses on the moon? Wasn’t that the year that Blade Runner was set it…? How time flies. Anyway, all of this is fantastic news. Fantastic news.

It is. It’s great. Obviously we feel a little gutted now, and, yes, there is the chance that the debacle at Wembley last night means that a number of careers will be destroyed and certain lives wrecked (the reason that goalkeepers have such big gloves, by the way, is so that they’re incapable of tying a rope into a noose after a bad game). And, yes, daydreaming about next summer it does seem, right now, as if we’ll be all the worse off – between the barbeques and the beer in the sunshine – for not having a telly to shout at for half a dozen games or so.

However, that’s all pretty short-term stuff. The reason that England getting knocked out of the Euro2008 finals is fantastic is that we’ll be spared the embarrassingly lame attempts to monetise on the event by every arm of the mobile industry.

And they will be embarrassingly lame, for the simple reason that sport & mobiles go together in the same way that your toaster & your bathtub go together; initially it seems like a good idea, because everyone likes toast, right? And everyone likes baths, right? So combining one with the other must, logically, be win-win. In reality, though, it leads to your rubber-duck melting and your hissing corpse running up an enormous electricity-bill. It’s this kind of reasoning that leads to marketing executives being given a cardboard-box and an escort out of the building by security.

It’s one of the most seductive dead-ends in business, really and, like medieval alchemy, it’s hard for normally right-minded people not to be tempted by the thought of combining sport (vastly wealthy, constantly moving, ravenous audience) with mobiles (vastly wealthy, constantly moving, ravenous audience) to end up with bags full of gold. However, nearly every attempt to do so is a complete car-crash.

In fact, it’s sometimes a quite literal car-crash when an F1 car – plastered with, say, Vodaphone adverts – crunches into a different F1 car plastered, with, say, O2 adverts. I’ve always wondered at the value of sponsorship deals, given the biblical sums of money that companies stump up; people have tried explaining why it’s worth paying five million pounds a year for a matchbox-sized logo above Lewis Hamilton’s left eye, say, but I usually glaze over when they start using words like ‘message awareness” and usually reach for the hammer when the words ‘intra-market appeal” roll out of their soon-to-be-smashed-in mouths. I just think their brand-managers might just like drinking champagne in Monte Carlo or Shanghai, personally, but then again, I always have been a little cynical…

Anyway, I feel I should make at least a pretence at supporting my original premise, so here goes – I’m going to ask you, now, to imagine that it’s next June, and also to imagine that we’d qualified for the finals. It’s the summer; it’s baking hot, your local high street doesn’t have any premature Christmas decorations up and not every girl in the entire sodding world is mincing about in those bloody awful ugg-boots they seem to think are so nice (they’re not, by the way, love, they just make you look like you’re wearing the cut-up remnants of some sheepskin carpet). But – it’s summer and, along with the constant adverts for sunblock, and supermarket deals for enough lager to kill yourself for a tenner, we’re all getting spammed silly with idiot deals from mobile providers & TV channels to get either scores sent to us via SMS or 3G snippets of goals we’re lucky enough to be able to pay a quid a time to see.

Call me ungrateful, but I’d rather just watch the bloody match, myself. Same with cricket, same with rugby; updates and highlights and event-driven message services are all well & good on the internet, on your computer where you have the connection, memory & screens-size to make it viable & enjoyable and to try and compress video-clips down to handset-size is, and always has been, lame. In prior generations of technology it was OK to pretend that the grainy, blocky, ten-second clip of a ball being punted into the back of a net was worth paying for but not now – not now we’re all so very used to all the delights of telly-quality snippets downloaded at not-unreasonable speeds.

The ultimate irony here is that mobiles themselves have always been an absolute godsend to those people wanting to play sport as opposed to watch it – for example, I spent most of my Sundays between April and September playing cricket, and the thought of trying to organise 22 men to be at the same place, at the same time, with the logistics of lifts, kit, food, drink, umpires & emergency-trips to hospitals with phone-boxes is just…just…impossible. how did they do it, twenty years ago? How? Even now getting a team or group of people together to play any sort of sport or game is, in the words of my own skipper, ‘like herding cats”. It’s like trying to imagine working in an office before Facebook – you know generations of people, before you, did it, and lived their lives without it, but just how they did it without going absolutely mental…?

So there we go – my summer will be blissfully free of excruciatingly clumsy attempts to sell me sporting action from whichever group of champagne-chugging ad-boys would’ve been perpetrating such wild & pointless attempts next year and, instead, will be busy making more grainy, blocky, ten-second clips of my own, of me catching cricket-balls with my face again – on YouTube, where they belong.