Last updated 13:11, Thursday, 23 October 2008

After a long and determined rearguard action, which saw me presented with two second-hand phones, neither of which I have ever used, I now finally have a mobile phone of my very own.

It is a new one, purchased by one of my offspring as a birthday present, so it would be churlish not to use it.

It’s a pay-as-you-go affair, which came with £10 worth of calls already paid for.

I’ve had it for about six weeks, and I expect to have spent my first pound sometime before Christmas.

Mobiles have limitless potential to embarrass, either by being left on accidentally and broadcasting intimate matters of a personal nature or by going off in inappropriate places, such as a funeral, the magistrates’ court or as happened earlier this month, in a meeting of Tynedale Council’s planning committee.

That unbending disciplinarian Coun. Ian Hutchinson makes it his business to insist at the start of every meeting that all phones are turned off – only for his own to trill during this month’s session.

You could have done toast on his face!

I have been a mobile-free zone for so long, I am always forgetting that I have one.

I was standing in Wetherspoon’s a month or so ago, when I became aware of a persistent shrilling.

“I wish someone would answer that phone,” I declared with some feeling, when my drinking companion gently pointed out it was coming from my pocket!

Since then, I have carried it in the breast pocket of my shirt but each time it goes off, I now feel that I am having a heart attack, as it judders and palpates against my chest.

It has to be said that I don’t get many calls, as only a few people know the number.

Those who don’t include myself.

My one regular caller, who goes by the name of Mike, thinks I am someone called Kevin, and is most reluctant to accept that he has a wrong number.

“So what number is that then?” he’ll demand, and I am forced to admit that I haven’t a clue, at which he hangs up, moments before he rings me again, and the whole process is repeated.

I like to think it’s Mike Ashley trying to offer an olive branch to the runaway Mr Keegan, and keep waiting for him to ask me which bank he would like to shower a few million sweeteners into, but it hasn’t happened yet.

I have had about 25 texts, 23 of which have come from Orange, trying to exhort me into investing yet more of my hard-earned cash into still more air time.

I have also sent my first and so far only text, which took a good couple of hours of honing and polishing before it was allowed to wing its way across the ether.

My version of the Ems Telegram was in response to a request from Mrs Hextol to bring some fish and chips home for tea, and consisted of a memorable “OK.”

I struggle to turn it on, and once it is on, I have even bigger problems turning it off again.

My last attempt at turning it off resulted in me making an unscheduled call to one of my brothers, so now I leave it to Mrs Hextol.

I have to say I was sorely tempted to throw it in the glove box of the car, where the two previous mobiles of my acquaintance lie dormant and unloved.

I have always struggled with technology, as well as having stubby, unco-operative fingers that never seem to press one button when three will do.

A teach-in on texting by Mrs Hextol was not an unqualified success, and had I been at school, I would have been placed in the corner sporting a dunce’s cap.

“There are children at play school who have mobile phones – why can’t you get your head round it?” she asked a little tetchily, as I cancelled the message it had taken 45 laborious minutes to peck out.

However, I am determined that I will succeed, as a result of witnessing one of the stupidest people I know, a man so dim that he needs both hands to find his own bottom, and who has to think what his name is, tapping out a message on his battered mobile.

If he can do it, so can I.