I WAS perfectly happy with my old mobile phone.

All it would do was call and text and take grainy pictures. I think it may have been possible to send emails on it, but I never felt the need, and never tried. My sons laughed at it, and at me, in a kindhearted, pitying sort of way. But I didn’t care.

It only cost £35, it was as comfortable as a pair of shapeless old tracksuit bottoms, and my fingers had acquired the ability to send messages superfast without even watching what I was doing.

Then it died. Its little screen just went blank, and all my efforts to revive it proved fruitless.

Having resisted all previous urging, arguing that there was no point spending a lot of money on something I didn’t care about, I caved in and entered the touch-screen all-singing-all-dancing smartphone era.

Readers of a certain age may remember a TV documentary in which researchers, for reasons best known to themselves, stuck a chimpanzee in front of a typewriter and pondered how long it would take pressing random combinations of keys to replicate the works of Shakespeare.

Smartphone users often remind me of those poor bemused creatures, slowly prodding away with one hopeful finger at an incomprehensible machine, the product of a far superior mind. To my mind, it ain’t a good look.

Anyway, never mind King Lear, it takes me ages to compose a three-word text using the teeny-tiny letters on that mock keyboard. To a touch-typist, that’s incredibly frustrating.

And the possibilities for embarrassment are seemingly endless.

A couple of weeks ago I was trying to organise a girls’ night out by text. What I actually sent, according to my phone, was a “multi-media message”. I had to look that up on Wikipedia – it means a message with a picture attached.

The only pictures I’d taken with it were of my mum’s old Ercol armchairs, so we could order some new covers. The phone also informed me that the message was winging its way to my sons’ former headmaster, who was likely to be rather surprised by an invitation to join our table the following evening, “7.45 at Prezzo”.

I had to hurriedly email his PA (from my computer, NOT my phone) to explain.

Luckily for me they both have a sense of humour.

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