Autumn is finally here. The X Factor is on television which
means it’s nearly Christmas, Britney (not her real name) has already chosen her
Halloween outfit and I have a hankering for shepherd’s pie and leek and potato
soup. It’s dark by 7pm, the log burner is lit every night and the mornings are
crisp and dewy. These days as I totter between the trees with my saddle
balanced on my hip, I have to stand on my tiptoes to select an apple for my
breakfast as the icy cold plum selection is no longer available. The leaves on
the trees are changing colour and beginning to float to the ground. My 6 sloes
are turning a beautiful bluey colour and Dobbin is able to sneakily nibble a
Blackberry from the hedge as he stands at the mounting block waiting for me to
clamber on board.
I can’t recall where I read the important piece of
information I’m about to share with you, but here it comes anyway: Apparently
you shouldn’t eat Blackberries after the 1st October because the
Devil has urinated on them.
Oddly enough as the Devil was completing peeing on all the
Blackberries in the world, the Canadian company Blackberry announced that they
would no longer be making mobile phones and would instead be concentrating on
making software. The demise of the Blackberry brand is a bit of a shocker
really. As recently as 2011 Blackberry were shifting 50 million phones a year.
In the old days when most mobiles had a number pad and a star and a hash
button, the QWERTY keyboard of the Bramble made emailing a breeze. Regrettably
Blackberry couldn’t keep up with the touch screens of the other market leaders
and hence after 14 years, Blackberry handsets are no more.
Blackberrys are like Marmite, you either adore them or you
hate them. Sometimes people hate them more than they hate Donald Trump, but I
loved mine as it did so many amazing things. I mean I could actually use it to
make phone calls, I could send people text messages and I could surf the
internet with amazing regularity. I could email people from it and I could use
it to take great photographs between my horse’s ears. Yes, it didn’t talk to a
multitude of Apps that would have been handy to have, but for me it was a phone
that did everything that I wanted it to do.
Last Tuesday my faithful Blackberry Z10 winked at me,
warning me that there was only 20% battery life remaining. I checked the phone
5 minutes later and it was flat. I plugged it in to the laptop that I was
working on. Nothing. I plugged it in to the desktop in the office downstairs.
Nothing. Frantic in the knowledge that I had lost all contact with the outside
world and being unable to look at Facetube, I raced home and plugged it in to
the mains charger. Nothing. It was completely dead and frankly after almost 3
years together I expected a little bit more from my beloved Z10. There was no
“Sorry, I’m not feeling all that well today” there was no “Ooooh dearie me, I
can’t let you send a text today as I’m feeling a bit under the weather”, there
wasn’t even a “I’m sooooo sick, plug me in and back me up pleeeeeese”. There
was no warning at all, the sodding thing just gave up and died. And as if that
wasn’t bad enough the Z10 took all her secrets to the grave as well, all my
contacts went with her and all my text messages too. The Z10 left me without an
alarm clock, without any friends and with no way of looking at my Instaphoto
account. I was faithful to the Z10 for so many months after my contract had
ended I expected it to try a bit bloody harder than that. On Tuesday evening I
left it in the kitchen to charge overnight thinking that might teach it a
lesson, but no, it was still dead the next morning. It was also stone cold
after a night’s charging. In short, it didn’t even have the bloody common
decency to get hot enough to burn my palm when I picked it up. So I chucked it
into the depths of my handbag while I looked online to see what its replacement
was going to be.
This was when things took a definite turn for the worse. My
mobile provider’s website said I had no account with them and to add insult to
serious injury, they also said my number was not a customer’s number. The
lovely Paula who I ended up speaking to for almost 2 hours, said it was to do
with my account being set up in 1998. Ah yes, when life was simples. The year
of my first ever mobile phone that was the size of a house brick and only made
phone calls, as text messaging hadn’t yet been invented. Consequently, while O2’s
IT Department was trying to sort out why their website refuses to recognise one
of their oldest customers, I drove 30 miles to the nearest shop to collect my
shiny new gold Samsung upgrade. The nice people at the mobile phone shop looked
at the Bitch-of-a-Blackberry-Z10 and when they pressed the “on” button it had
the cheek to flash a red light, as if it was trying its hardest to restart.
After 40 minutes the nice people in the shop had managed to scrape 6 contacts
from my knackered SIM; and guess what? They are all for people that I have
either spoken to once or for people who I don’t like. The Bramble is now
packaged up in its special envelope ready to go for recycling. And the very worst
bit? I’ve just found the sodding new battery I bought for it back in June so
I’ve shoved that into the recycling envelope as well.
That’ll teach it.
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