Let the tennis-playing puffins be or How to stay faithful to your mobile phone

As I was driving to work this autumn morning - daylight in retreat, fog on the grasslands - I was listening, as one is wont to do on such drives, to the radio. (My station of choice is Magic FM, as I grew up in the 80s and there is a lot of nostalgia value on 105.4).

Between a segue of three songs are the adverts. The usual ones warning me that the chip in my windscreen needs to be inspected (I may have a chip on my shoulder but not my windscreen, boys), the TGI Friday one advertising Jack Daniel's Sesame Chicken and a travel agency that puns its destinations, such as "business Tripoli".

But to break the routine a little there was a new advert for a mobile phone which has the latest doo-da that replaces the old oojamafluke and it's absolutely essential that we upgrade.

Mobile phones have come along way since they resembled a brick. With every gadget and gizmo added, mobile phones become harder to recycle. They are one of the most environmentally-unfriendly technological products because they use so may different components, that it is no simple feat to break it down and recycle it.

Sure, mobile phones are useful devices, but they are a nuisance also. Many is the time I've sat on public transport and had to listen some loudmouth's inane drivel. I remember once being seated on a train in front of some woman who bellowed her medical ailments more as if she were talking to someone three carriages down rather than on her phone.

But that's noise pollution. That's a different kettle of evil (it is also a reason why I no longer use public transport - something the Mayor of London might like to address before encouraging us to go green and use the bus).

Yes, Mobile phones are hard to recycle primarily because of how complex they are becoming. I have often failed to see the point of having a camera installed on my phone. I've never used it. Okay, okay I have used it but no matter what I photograph the end result always looks like a puffin on a gravel tennis court.

Maybe I shouldn't say that. Maybe the head honchos at Samsung and Erickson are developing the latest super-resolution camera for your phone so you can conveniently photograph your favourite celebrity when you see him slipping over spilled rocket leaves at your local Waitrose.

Or probably they already have. I just wouldn't know because I don't change mobile phones until one is dead. In many ways I am serially monogamous to my mobile phones.

Not that I am being holier-than-thou (oh you who upgrade your phone twice a year), indeed I was the one driving to work this morning. No, I just have no need to upgrade my phone. I don't need a camera or games, I don't need bluetooth (unless in the event that I must urgently send a photograph of a puffin on a gravel tennis court to Bill Oddy), I don't need Internet access.

All I require from a phone is the ability to call other phones and to text other phones.

Do not covet thy neighbour's Erickson. Your own phone is good enough. Forget bluetooth. Nature is red in denture and talon, not aquamarine or azure.

Don't go through serial, expensive divorces to your phones. Stay faithful, enter into a long-term commitment to your phone.

By making as much use of your current mobile phone as possible, we can help minimise the effects of pollution and environmental destruction caused by mobile phone technology.


Top right photo: A puffin, neither on a gravel tennis court nor captured by mobile phone camera.