Store your memories in your head Ð not on your mobile

Date Published: {J}

The curse of the mobile phone was bad enough when it just meant there was no longer anywhere to escape to – but since they added so many apps and facilities, it has turned into a complete nightmare.Take the video facility on your average smart phone – and I wish to God somebody would. You cannot go to a concert now without a sea of the bloody things in the air recording whatever performer is on stage from a distance you couldn’t make out your own mother from.

Once they waved cigarette lighters in the air; now it’s a sea of phones – and I’ve yet to meet anyone who has subsequently watched the fruit of their cinematography talents once the recording has been saved into the phone.

The other one – which is equally annoying if you’re standing beside the person or you’re the recipient of their largesse and stuck at home – is when a concert-goer thinks that what someone half asleep at home really needs is a quick blast of audio from a gig they didn’t actually want to go to.

So you ring them as Blondie launches into Heart of Glass at the Arts Festival Big Top and you tell your friend to just shut up and listen as you give them a blast of the classic on a dodgy phone when, if they really wanted to hear it, they could play the album in surround sound stereo at home.

But I’ve a solution for this one which I deploy at every opportunity – as soon as our phone recorder swings into action and holds his mobile in the air for full acoustic effect, I launch into an off-key version of the song with only half the words so that he or she quickly pulls away the phone with a look of disdain of their face and a sense of achievement on mine.

Of course you cannot blame this phenomenon entirely on the phone – there are mini-recorders, Flip cameras, little digital recorders that make James Bond’s gadgets look like something out of The Flintstones.

The aforementioned Flip, for example, is about the size of a large cigarette lighter but can store two hours of material before you have to download it onto your computer and store it in a place you are never likely to access again.

You go to any sporting occasion now and everyone’s a photographer; as the professional snapper lines up the teams he or she is swept aside by a sea of parents who cameras and phones to give an U-12 challenge match all of the importance of a World Cup Final.

The phone means you’re never out of touch which can be a good thing – but it should be taken off people if they’re going to have a few drinks. Because to adapt an old TV message about drinking and driving, a phone in the hands of a drunk is a dangerous weapon.Of course, the real dangers are in texting either current or ex wives or girlfriends and telling them something for better or worse that you wouldn’t have the heart or courage to do in the cold light of day – but that’s a column for another time. This is about bothering them in your

deluded notion that they’d much rather be out there with you than tucked up under the duvet asleep and taking the mature approach to work in the morning.

And yet, after giving out about them all, I have to admit that I too have phoned sleeping people from the O2 when Paul McCartney was belting out the best of the Beatles; I’ve videoed Leonard Cohen from three fields away, and I have audio recordings on my phone that have all of the acoustic brilliance of a karaoke night in a very crowded pub. 

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.