Rosemary Potatoes

I have watched The Spouse try to come to grips with a series of cellphones over the years. They say Kiwis are quick to embrace any new technology and there he was, lined up with the best of them, when the first mobile phones came out. He had this thing that looked like it had been manufactured at a brick factory. It had quite an imposing aerial and a pretty solid battery. It certainly wasn't a subtle number you could slip in a shirt pocket.

A string of mobiles followed, each a little smaller that the previous one. They became increasingly sophisticated. Along came car chargers, hands-free operation.

Then there was WAP technology and goodness knows what else.

Some disappeared back to their maker fairly promptly, having developed a fault, or having been recalled. The last one developed a curious rattle - a death rattle, as it happened. And so, at the weekend, The Spouse had another cellphone to play with.

He made the mistake of producing it at the dinner table on Saturday night. The three other men who had joined us for a meal took this as their immediate cue to bring forth their own personal communication weapons. Sizes were compared, weights, screen colours. Then came a more detailed analysis. The computer expert quickly established whose did what. The Spouse's new one was, fortunately, fairly state of the art. The human resources bloke had been sold a lemon, the young manager had a fairly small but perfectly formed one with a flip out speaker.

We then had a recital of ring tones - some regulation ones, other downloaded from the internet.

Being the only woman present, I felt severely outnumbered. My modest little purple pay-as-you-go number couldn't compete. It stayed out in the kitchen, although I smugly noted that mine seemed to be the only one with a built in hands-free speaker - very useful when you're in a noisy street trying to troubleshoot a son's computer in another country, or sort out some other domestic crisis.

I have at last embraced text messaging - but only since I discovered Vodafone has a web-to-text facility on its internet site and I am a much faster typist than texter. Am I the only person who pecks away for minutes then loses the text message I am trying to send? Or who sends the recipient their own name and cellphone number instead of the message I have been labouring over?

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