A few Christmases ago my brother bought my father a hands-free kit for his mobile phone. It was deliberately very simple in construction; a small grey box with a large green button in the middle. The verbal instructions went something like this:

bro: When you push the button and hold it down it will eventually beep - that means it’s on. What does the beep mean?

pa: It’s on?

bro: Well done! Now, to answer a call you push the button once. What do you do?

pa: Push the button once.

bro: Excellent! Now, to hang up the call you push the button once, but to turn off the hands-free you push the button down until it eventually beeps. Got it?

pa: Got it.

After that there was much wandering round of the house, saying things like “Can you hear me? Hello? I’m in the kitchen” until they both got bored and went to watch an Only Fools and Horses rerun. Within a fortnight Dad had lost the power lead and the little grey box joined other such gifts under a pile of vitally useful yet seldom required detritus.

Today I received several phonecalls from my father. I was, as you can imagine, slightly concerned as my mother is usually in charge of all off-spring contact, and he opened the initial call with a worried “can you hear me?”

Was it bad news?

Had there been an accident?

Was he enquiring as to my welfare, perturbed by a lack of recent contact ?

No.

“I’m calling because I need to set the volume on my new hands-free kit and I don’t want to wake your mother because she’s on night shift. Okay, bye.”

Ah.

Idiot simple and he loses the bits. Highly technical and he plays with it for hours. I hope to god it’s age related and not genetic.

Yes, I’ve changed the look of the blog.

No, I haven’t suddenly become both techno-savvy and concerned about appearances.

Maybe I had brain freeze and couldn’t think of anything to blog so entertained myself by sodding around on WordPress.

(It was either that, or do some actual work…)

3.3.09

I didn’t post on Monday as I was dealing with …well…not really a hangover as such, more like an undefinable feeling that my feet weren’t touching the ground. And my brain was still in the house. And I was on Mars.

All I remember clearly about the end of the evening was making my way home, arms outstretched with a kebab in one hand and a cigarette in the other (to ‘balance’ me, apparently), stamping down hard on the pavement to stop it playing silly buggers as I veered into walls.

And today I dropped the temperature probe into a full kettle of soup, thereby proving once and for all that my clumsiness is not alcoholically induced. At all. Ever.