Jessica McFarland

I have a mobile phone. It makes calls. It sends texts. It does very little else.

Why is this? you may well ask. Am I:

1. afraid of technology?
2. too lazy to go get an upgrade? or simply
3. making an effort to be minimalist?

No, I would answer. It is, in fact, a result of my being relieved of my Nokia 5800 Xpress Music somewhere on Old Kent Road, Peckham. Whether I left it at the ASDA checkout or it was taken from my purse on the bus, I don’t know, and I fear I never shall. It doesn’t matter. It’s gone.

It wasn’t the best phone, if I’m honest. The touch screen occasionally gave me fits, and the handy little slide-in stylus slid out one day and I never saw it again. Also, if I asked it to do more than one thing at a time, it became overwhelmed and turned itself off. (Ha, I wish I could do that when anyone asked me to multitask!)

But there were a lot of good things about it, too. Having it meant I would never be without music on a bus, I would always have a camera handy, and I could never get completely lost, thanks to GPS. Plus there was the internet. Oh, the internet. I could look up whatever information I’d left at home, plus random tidbits on Wikipedia, and send any emails that absolutely couldn’t wait a couple hours. In my pocket.

And then suddenly it was gone. Of course I had it immediately blocked and switched my number to a new SIM card. And of course I didn’t have insurance on my absent phone (as if I’d pay for that! I never lose phones!…well now I’ve lost one), but that was okay too, because I had an unlocked phone to use. It was…wait for it….

A Nokia 1100. I never recycled it because it was only worth £1! And this is what I would be reduced to using, given the ridiculous costs involved in getting a new phone mid-contract. Oh yes, I know how ridiculous those costs are, because I looked into them. The thought of going from the all-singing, all-dancing, does-everything-but-the-washing-up 8GB GPS enabled smartphone to a tiny, monochrome screen gave me chills, and yet, I couldn’t really justify the expense of getting anything better. So I resigned myself to my new low-tech existence and left all the shiny new phones in their boxes at Carphone Warehouse.

That was over a week ago, and the most amazing thing has happened since. No, I didn’t find my old phone in the couch cushions, though I haven’t actually looked there…okay no, it’s not there. It’s still gone. But, quite unexpectedly, I love this crummy old phone! These are all the reasons why the Nokia 1100 is better than the much newer, much more expensive phone I lost:

1. I don’t have to take it out of a protective case to look at the time. It’s right there on the screen.
2. It’s got a torch on the end!
3. The buttons were made to be pressed by humans, not telepathic cyber-beings who also have toothpick fingers.
4. The monophonic ringtones are never hip, and certainly never soothing, but are always audible.
5. The composer function. I made my own un-hip monophonic ringtones. (If you’ve been on London public transport recently and heard beeps to the tune of “Take on me” by A-ha, that was me.)
6. It’s indestructible, and finally…
7. No one will ever steal it. Who would bother?

And after all, I did survive for 20-something years without a fancy phone (and most of those years without a mobile phone at all, but let’s not get out of control here). So I don’t have GPS? I can print maps off of google, or leave a little earlier, or pay attention to my surroundings. So I don’t have an mp3 player? I have a book. So I don’t have a camera? Actually, I do have a camera. A really nice one, which I will use more often now.

So I’m enjoying my little just-a-phone quite a bit. And perhaps I can start a new fashion trend. Sort of a retro-chic. Cooler than an iphone. How cool do you need to be to have an iphone, anyway? Everybody’s got one. Yeah, I’m going to rock this old phone. And then maybe I’ll get a portable cassette player to go with it. Everyone will want to jump onto this new trend. Just wait. It’ll happen.

Anyone who has read Vanity Fair might recognise the title, and realise that I’m about to wax lyrical about the role that the much maligned c-word, “credit”, plays in my life.

I am not a big spender. I am not, for example, a great lover of shoes. I shouldn’t even need a credit card. Unfortunately, given the nature of my work, I never know how much money I am going to make in a month before it has arrived in my account. Meanwhile food must still be purchased, and the Oyster must still be fed. So, often, I will put things like food and transportation on the credit card so that I’ll have cash left over to pay for things like rent and bills, expenses that can’t be taken care of on credit. My mother assures me that this is a sensible way to avoid being evicted.

But when I think about it, it is a bit surreal. If when I add the bank balance to the credit card balance the result is zero, that should mean the same as if I actually had zero money. But it doesn’t. I can continue to pay bills as a functioning member of society as long as there’s a positive somewhere, even if it’s (more than) cancelled out by a negative elsewhere.

So it’s less about the actual amounts in each account, and more about the gradient between the two. Like osmosis, and the ATM is a semi-permeable membrane, and as long as cash can flow from an area of higher concentration to lower, I can get to work and eat dinner.

Furthermore, because this is mostly happening in numbers on a computer screen, with sometimes a little bit of plastic and a chip and PIN reader involved, it hardly seems real. If I actually have no money when I add all the accounts together, and no actual cash in my wallet, yet I can still go around and do pretty much anything I want, then surely I am living in a Star Trek-esque money-free economy based on, I dunno, love and trust and Vulcans. And well, that’s pretty okay. And I’m going to remember that the next time I start to worry about money. Pointy ears, yeah.

(Though, come to think of it, living well on nothing a year didn’t turn out so well for Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. Better for Reese Witherspoon, but only because liberties were taken with the film version. Must assess situation.)

Now I am become death, the destroyer of ants.

It started innocuously enough. I would see a lone ant here or there, in the front room or the kitchen. Not wanting to harm a creature that had not (yet) harmed me, I left them alone. I mean, how much space does one ant take up? Surely there’s room in here for the both of us, and can’t we all just get along?

Then, without warning, what I see now to be the inevitable happened. I came home on Friday evening, after an epic grocery shopping trip no less, went to put the groceries away, and found that the entire kitchen countertop was alive. I was totally overrun. I could almost hear the accompanying horror film soundtrack.

What happened next was, unfortunately, necessary. I killed them, I killed them all without mercy. I sprayed them with multi-purpose cleaner and wiped them up with a sponge before rinsing them down the drain. I pulled up the venetian blinds and got all the ones on the window sill. I picked up the pile of dirty dishes and got the ones under there, too.

Any that managed to get away must have hobbled back to the ant hill in the front garden and collapsed, babbling incoherently, after having witnessed the mass murder of their peers. It would have taken hours, days maybe, before they were able to tell the whole ghastly story. Monuments will be built. Minutes of silence will be observed. Those that were lost will not be forgotten.

Or so I would hope. But it’s far more likely that none escaped, because presumably if they had, they would have told the others not to come back. Seriously. I do try to help them of course. On the suggestion of a friend, I have sprinkled ground cloves along the window sill. This is supposed to mess with their sensory mechanism enough make them stay away.

It does work, to an extent, though only for about a week. And then they’re back (and in greater numbers). In the meantime, the brown powder all over the place makes me look like the least efficient cook ever. I would like to avoid pesticides, and not from a humane perspective (I mean, if the poison doesn’t kill them, I will). I just don’t think that noxious chemicals and food preparation are a winning combination.

So, for now anyway, it’s a weekly sprinkle of clove powder in the kitchen. And when that fails, the sponge. I am the last thing so many ants ever see. I am the destroyer of ant worlds. I am death (the death of ants).

Ugh. I shouldn’t let myself get so tired.

My eyelids are drooping, even though I’ve been on a steady drip of tea, coffee, and coca cola all day long. Work was a major mission; after work activities nearly as much of one.

I should have gone to bed earlier last night, like I should be going to bed now. But there’s so much to be done! I love creating things, writing, playing music, too much these days to let sleep become a priority.

It’s fantastic. I’m finally one-of-those-people, an artist-type, yielding to a higher power, answering the call of the muse. I worked at getting here. I’ve been cajoling myself into creating something most nights for months now, until it has become a habit. I have altered my behaviour. (Yessssss.)

But, as I said before, man am I ever tired. I budgeted time for everything except sleep. This was a miscalculation. I’ve accomplished all the little things I want to do in a week, but now I feel I could sleep for a year.

Oh, I can feel it now. Sleep is becoming exciting again. During the week it seems to get in the way of having a life outside of going to work and coming home. But tonight I’m going to fill the hot water bottle and curl up in a duvet and not set an alarm. Or better yet, set it for a good hour after I normally wake up, and then alternately listen to Heart Radio and hit the snooze button. It will be amazing.

Because being tired is so very lame. I don’t think straight. I’m not thinking straight now. I wait until I’m at the point of exhaustion, and then I decide I need to solve all the problems in my life, the lives of people I know, and major world issues. Then I get frustrated when solutions aren’t forthcoming.

But sleep magically fixes these things, and everything looks better in the morning. Good night!

Tonight, as I stood at the bus stop, waiting a very cold 14 minutes for the 177 towards Peckham, I happened to spare a thought for where I was–Greenwich, London. The small portion of my mind that was not in the process of succumbing to hypothermia thought about how very close I was to the Greenwich Meridian, 0 degrees longitude.

Well that’s pretty cool, right? Only a short walk and I would have been in the Eastern hemisphere. That should be far more significant than crossing measly state lines in the U.S. But there’s not even a sign. Yeah, sure, there’s the Royal Observatory, Greenwich Park, and shops with big clocks. But I’m unsatisfied. At least between the states they put signs on the roads, a time zone boundary, or perhaps an absolutely enormous river. But in London, one can roam idly between whole hemispheres and not even notice.

According to Wikipedia, at night there’s a laser beam, and what looks like a blurry picture of a doorway I’ve never seen. This is weak.

We need big fence, or a wall. Big one. I’m not saying it should go the entire longitude line. Maybe just through Blackheath. And since the two hemispheres aren’t at war with each other, it wouldn’t have to be guarded. Or even opaque. It could be made from perspex. And then you could go visit it with your friends, and stand on either side, and wave at each other from different hemispheres.

Or if there was no budget for perspex, there could at least be a line. Again, a big obvious one. And then you could stand with one foot on one side and one on the other. Sort of like at Four Corners Monument, U.S., where you can be simultaneously in the states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

Oooh, there should be a Four Corners Monument for the Equator and the Prime Meridian. Then you could be in four hemispheres simultaneously, though I guess everyone’s always in at least two. Unfortunately, 0 degrees north, south, east and west is in the ocean, off the coast of Western Africa. So next we’re going to need an aircraft carrier….