iphone

Finding your real calling

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The moment I’ve hit Send on this to you, I am out the door and driving to a school. I go in to schools sometimes as a visiting author and the conceit is that I am there to talk about being a writer, sure, where the truth is I instead make ’em write. I have no intention of telling school pupils about me, chiefly because I already know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it, let’s write something brilliant together.

Only, there’s a small difference today in that the school I’m visiting is a secondary one and although it’s still a writing day, when you’re with people who are soon going to have to pick subjects and choose career paths, there is the question of whether you recommend writing as a career. I won’t discourage anyone wanting to write, but I won’t insist that it is anything other than the greatest job you can possibly have — if it’s right for you. And I will insist, on the slightest excuse, that being able to write is enormously useful regardless of the career you go into.

Be the footballer who also writes and you’ll be able to convey whatever it is that’s apparently so interesting about kicking a ball about. Plus that communication skill – look, you know this already, being able to communicate and convey helps anyone.

Only, I have this week discovered that I’m not supposed to be a writer.

To be fair, I’ve suspected it often and occasionally been told so by a reader.

But this week I got the email from LinkedIn. If you don’t happen to use LinkedIn or if you do happen to ignore its emails, what you may not be aware of is that it will tell you if someone has been searching for you on the service. It tells you specifically so that you will spend money to find out more, but even without doing that, you get some details. Plus it’s rather nice, to think someone out there you’ve probably never heard of, is looking for you.

I write that and it sounds ominous.

But you get the LinkedIn email and it has a subject heading like “You appeared in eight searches this week.” It is quite possible that I even preened.

Only, among the detail that you get, there is this. How they found you. Apparently in my case, none of the eight people sought me out by name, which is obviously fine, and not one of them considered me to be a writer or anything even vaguely approaching that. Instead, all eight found me by a keyword search, which is illuminating.

Because – truly – the words these people used to find me were: “food source”.

Funny, again it’s only when I write that down that it seems deeply ominous.

750

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Possibly I’m wrong here because you do seem more organised than I do, but I am pretty sure you have never counted how many conversations you’ve had with someone. And apparently I have, because it turns out that this is the 750th Self Distract blog I’ve written.

If you’re going to count something, I feel you may as well do it thoroughly so after some poking around, I can tell you something. Over the 749 Self Distract posts up to this one, I’ve written 587,160 words, including several good ones. I mean, I’ve written the word “myriad” and used it correctly 24 times.

Self Distract in any recognisable form started in February 2006, which is frankly another country. It didn’t become a weekly natter with you until after I left Radio Times in 2012 or so.

I’d like to say it’s been an unbroken weekly blather every Friday, but that’s not quite true. The result of the Brexit vote was announced on Friday, June 24, 2016, for instance, and I was too paralysed to move.

Then there was pretty much the whole of December 2017 when my website was broken. But apart from two total failures, then, it’s been every week for a decade, so an otherwise unbroken run of 521 Self Distracts.

Some 500 posts ago, I told myself I was writing this because I missed having the deadlines I did of a TV history column in Radio Times and a DVD review one in BBC Ceefax and BBC News Online. They all seemed to end at the same time and I do miss them, but really I was writing Self Distract to write to you and that’s done me a lot of good over the years.

Often it’s been the one quiet, still moment in my week. In bad weeks it’s been the one quiet refuge. It’s continually been a lagrange point, which is something I apparently first mentioned as being on my mind back in 2013.

Other times what I’ve written here has been indirectly responsible for my being commissioned to write various things. And once it was directly responsible for my being flown to California, where I got to meet a couple of my writing heroes.

But looking back over half a million words, I keep seeing times when I was trying to describe something that I didn’t understand. And the action of trying to describe it to you visibly helped me see what I meant, helped me see why I felt the way I did about something.

Self Distract is about writing, about what we write about, and what we write with when we get around to writing. It is inescapably a journal of what is on my mind, yet it’s not a diary. I am not writing it to me, I’m writing it to you, specifically you, and whether I’ve done that well or poorly, the focus has helped me. Thank you.

Don’t tell

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There is a moment in the 2002 film Kissing Jessica Stein that I think is all the more exquisitely well done because it doesn’t happen.

Helen has placed a lonely hearts kind of ad in the newspaper — this was 2002, there were still newspapers — and has had a couple of phone calls in response to it. So we’ve got how it works, what’s supposed to happen, and we’ve also been set up for half a dozen other issues that will play out over the course of the film, but the kicker is how perfect the setup is that takes us to the point where Jessica phones Helen.

Except she doesn’t.

Or rather, she must do, but we never see it. We are delivered to this moment when the call is certain and then we’re with them on their date. Despite the eleventy billion people telling you that showing something is better than telling it, this film is better because it does not do that.

I wouldn’t know from watching the film, but apparently the budget was very low and very tight. So it’s possible that there just wasn’t time in the schedule to shoot that phone call. But I think it was the decision of writers Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen. They also star as Jessica and Helen respectively.

I do have a thing against characters asking questions in drama, but I’ve not had a problem with showing things instead of telling them. But don’t tell. Don’t show, don’t tell, don’t ask. Not all the time, not when it isn’t necessary.

All of which seems obvious now I’ve written it down, I mean I can see you nodding, wondering when I’m going to get to a point you don’t already know or can’t already see.

But maybe what I’m thinking is that this phone call that we don’t see really works because of everything that leads up to it not happening, and everything that results from it. Much as I just singled out one tiny moment in a film, maybe you just cannot do that.

All of this is on my mind because I’ve just rewatched the film, and I’ve just rewatched it because I read that this year is its twentieth anniversary. There’s a lot being written and said about it, and I can’t decide whether I’m more startled that it’s two decades or that anyone but me knows it.

Kissing Jessica Stein is one of those films – or books, TV, radio, theatre – that intellectually you know has been seen by millions, but it feels like it’s only yours. I’ve never been in a gay relationship, never had the string of bad dates Jessica does, never lived in New York, yet a chiefly lesbian romcom set in Manhattan is mine.

I can see that I am drawn to yearning, I’ve spotted that in other favourites like Hearts & Bones, and I am definitely a romance fan. Even in a comedy, the stakes in a romance are so tall that I think all romances are secretly thrillers.

And some of them have great titles. I just don’t know why I think Kissing Jessica Stein is such a good title, I don’t know why that is what made me watch it on TV close to two decades ago, but I love that I did.

Relax, don’t do it

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I have no clue what you do to relax but that’s fair enough, I don’t have the faintest notion what I do either. Yet for some reason, and who knows why, just lately I’ve been worrying about it. I’ve been conscious that I don’t know how to do this relaxing thing. What with one thing and another, it could be 5am when I start work, then 8pm before I sit down to dinner and I spend the rest of the evening wondering what to do.

I did fall asleep in the bath the other day.

I’m not interested in work/life balance, I don’t see them as two different things because everything I’ve been able to take everything I’ve ever enjoyed and make it be part of my work. Hmm. I am interested in how saying that 5am to 8pm bit sounds simultaneously like a boast and a whinge. Either way, it’s not good, so let me reassure you that the real problem is that I’m getting so little done in that time.

Although this is relaxing me, actually, writing to you right now. You’ve got a look in your eye and I’m warily wondering where you’re going to go with that, but talking like this is definitely relaxing.

Also reading, that’s good. I read a script every day and yesterday’s one was utter bliss. I can’t tell you what it was because I got it through a job I’m doing but it was an 45-minute TV script so, being a fast reader, for about half an hour I wasn’t in my office, I was in Derry in the 1990s.

Just thinking it through, that was also about the 11th hour I’d been in front of a screen yesterday. It’s startling how you can physically be in one place, physically using one Mac, and yet it feels like every hour is completely different. Scriptwriting, video editing, article writing, project management, watching a snippet of TV over a very fast lunch, audio editing, research, and countless conversations over email.

I say countless, the truth is that there isn’t that much, I just don’t count it.

Somehow I also don’t count it as work, nor as relaxation. Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea of what the word means. I might ponder that, although some fifteen years ago now, my therapist told me that I overthink things. To this day I wonder what she really meant.

Maybe I should just relax.

Critical analysis

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I got trolled a little bit this week and the only important point is to stress just how astoundingly tiny that little bit was. I mean, come on, I’m a middle-aged white man, I will never know from actual trolling. Not even when I’m English but just used that American construction, “never know from”.

This is entirely off the point, but there’s just something I like about that phrasing. Also the way Americans might say something “most every day.” Can’t figure out why that pleases me so. I do know, for instance, that I like the word “gotten” because there’s such rage about it in England over what’s seen as the bastardisation of the language — yet in truth the word is British English through and through. It’s just that America held on to it, kept using it, protected it, and somehow we in the UK forgot it ever existed.

Anyway.

I’m obviously thinking about this trolling since I’m here talking to you two days – no, wait, um, nope, can’t be sure: it’s either two or three days since it happened. Might be four: it’s been a long week.

I am perturbed that someone could use my personal email address, the one that I’ll give you if I haven’t already, yet which I never share publicly. But the actual insulting bit, no. Neither now when I am struggling to remember what he said nor in the very moment when I read it, at no point could I manage an entire shrug.

All that happened is that some fella decided to email me to say I am a terrible writer. Finally, I thought, someone who agrees with me.

Yet it was a shitty email in all sorts of senses and I didn’t keep it around to study, but I don’t think a team of linguistic experts would have been able to determine what precisely he didn’t like. I’m saying it was a man although I didn’t register the name, but you know it was a man.

He did specifically mention my blog, but that’s just screwy. This is my only blog, right here, and he definitely cannot have meant this because whether it’s written well or terribly, it’s not written to him, it’s written to you.

So I had a little bump in the road as I read it, trying to fathom what it was about. But if I cannot overstress how little this little bit of trolling was, I also cannot find the words to describe how briefly it was in front of me. I am a fast reader, it was a short email, I took it all in with one glance, registering that there was nothing useful there and blocking the sender before I could even finish thinking the word “tosser”.

Only…

This man decided to write to fill me in on my being a bad writer and it’s that act, that decision, that’s had me wondering. I’ve wondered before of course, whenever you hear of the foul things so many people get sent over social media, but this act of flinging out a quite petulant email put it all back in my head again.

There is not one single pixel of a chance that I would ever email a writer to say they are crap – note, not to say that I think they are, that I don’t happen to like their work, but that they actually are crap.

I wouldn’t do it because I’m pragmatic, I might need to work with them some day. I wouldn’t do it because I’m a professional writer and I know very well what you see on screen or read on paper goes through a hell of a journey to get there and we can never know what has happened on someone else’s journey. And I wouldn’t do it because, I hope, I’m a nice guy.

Yet even though I believe all of this to be true, in all practical honesty, these reasons may not be why I wouldn’t do it.

The real reason might be this: who has the time?

Ringing the changes

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I don’t think people know how to use phones any more.

Quick story. It’s some time in the 1980s and I’m in a producer’s office, pitching him a factual idea for BBC Radio 4 that I’d called “555”. It was about the then little-known fact that every telephone number uttered in any American film or TV show began with the area code 555. Today you’d make a YouTube video about it and about how America’s Bell Telephone Co reserved that whole code for filmmakers, but back then I had a good case for also finding the UK equivalent, looking into the stories of what happens when shows use real phone numbers instead, and so on.

Back then, in that office, though, I am also there when the producer’s phone rings precisely as I first say “555”, and when he answers but there’s no one there. Back then, this kind of dead call was rare enough that he hung up the receiver and said that it was surely a sign that we should make this show.

We never did.

Anyway. Today, yes, I get three or four dead calls a day. I know that I can block them on my iPhone but only in such a way that I also block calls from people offering me work, so, you know, I put up with the dead calls. Incidentally, I’ve learned that if I pick up and do not say a word, a huge proportion of the time, they hang up. You can’t imagine me not talking. Thanks.

That aside, I know you just pictured me picking up my iPhone and putting it to my ear. Or you definitely pictured the 1980s producer picking up the phone receiver and holding it to his.

And that’s what I see changing. Maybe it’s just a greater awareness of my surroundings post-pandemic lockdowns, but now I seem to see a lot more people talking on their phones as I walk around outside – and none of them put those phones to their ears. It’s now always, always, that they hold the phones out in front of them and are using the speakerphone.

I’m not saying this is wrong, it’s just that it’s like the sudden majority don’t know there used to be this thing about holding it to your ear. Sometimes it’s like they don’t want to hold the phone that closely, it’s like they are staring at this device in fear of its witchcraft and/or post-Brexit roaming charges. Sometimes they’re tweeting while they talk and sometimes that leads them into a tree. Or sometimes they’re on video calls and I like video calls, I’m just a little less keen at staring up someone’s nose while we talk.

But it’s now so common to see phones used being this way that if you do see someone holding a phone up to their ear, either they are old or you are in a film.

I know mobile phones killed off a lot of cheap tricks in drama, like the ominous slow pan to the ringing hall telephone seconds after the hero has left on what we know is probably not a fatal errand but we’re supposed to think that this week it just could be. Or when characters are trying to call each other at the same time so the lines are engaged and that’s it, we’re on our own now.

I also know that mobiles have opened up new drama possibilities, like saying you’re in one place when you’re in another, or being tracked by which cellphone towers your call goes through, or Android phone users being able to call for help while iPhone ones look for a charger.

But I didn’t know how the use of phones has so visually changed.

Or maybe I just don’t know why so many people now believe I must hear both sides of their conversation. Look, you were on a break, okay?

Writing by numbers

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I know I stole this thought from somewhere, but for the longest time I’ve felt I sit right on the edge between arts and technology. That’s nice for me. And actually, yes, it is. I get to write scripts and drama, I get to use tools that help and excite me, I also get to write about those. Typically where these two spheres meet, I get to have a very good time. But not always.

This week, I got an email on my iPhone from a company championing music technology over the arts. Not with the arts, not for, but above it. Use their music system and you will know –– this was the selling point, you would actually know –– that your song is going to be a hit. Or not. And if it isn’t, you therefore know to throw it away and do something else until you get it right.

I think this is obviously wrong all round. I’m minded of David Cameron, who apparently once told British filmmakers that they should only make successful films. I remember going a little pale. I don’t know anything about, say, the UK’s legal agreements with the EU, but I’d ask before I decided I knew best and broke them.

At the time, it was a sobering and slightly scary thought that someone running the country could be that, well, let’s cut to it, stupid. Now it would be a bit of a surprise if they weren’t.

There was a little more, though. Cameron specifically referenced The King’s Speech, the tremendous film written by David Seidler. This is a film that was a worldwide success, absolutely, and a deserved one. However, it was also a historical movie about a rich man most of the world hasn’t heard of, working his way up to making one speech. Of all the people needed to make that film happen, you can be certain that every one of them did so because the script was great, not because they really thought it was going to be a blockbuster success. “Hold off on that Batman project, we’ve got this now.”

If Cameron thought at all – and he appeared to spend more than a chance second on it so again how stupid was he? – then what he thought was that it was possible to know what would be a success. You know what films have been a hit before, make films like that. I truly, truly cannot fathom a mind that would think that, then point to The King’s Speech, and say ta-daa, that was a hit because all obscure historical movies with no action always have been.

This is all crossing my mind as I’m in my kitchen, reading this email from a firm that wants me to write about how musicians can emulate previous hits and never have to create anything new at all. That’s a firm who knows what listeners want. And why musicians write.

I am far from being against mixing technology with music. If I were a musician, you bet I’d be hands on with Logic Pro to master my album. And just now, just before you and I started nattering, I was listening to Francisca Valenzuela’s fantastically powerful Flotando. I was listening over AirPods and it was as if the room were full of this wonderful, enveloping Chilean music.

I offer, though, that while I listened over technology, and it was a free track of hers on iTunes ten years ago that got me to try her music, there’s nothing else. Nothing in my listening history should trigger any algorithm to think oh, yes, let’s play him Chilean pop music he won’t understand and is by an artist who has never charted in his country.

Any sane algorithm, any informed analysis of my musical tastes would do the opposite, it would skip Francisca Valenzuela entirely. And I would therefore be missing out on a decade of music I relish, plus right now a song that –– it’s true –– I don’t understand, but which fills my chest as much as my ears.

Then there is this. This isn’t the music technology’s fault, they couldn’t know that I’d be reading their email on an iPhone. They might have guessed, mind, since the iPhone is –– literally –– the best-selling product of any kind in the world, ever. And if you don’t have an iPhone, you have an Android phone.

So take a look.

Apple vs Samsung count image

That’s a court image from a legal case between Apple and Samsung, but it’s broadly illustrative. What I’d suggest is that it would be much the same if you changed it from just these two companies and into a larger chart with every phone from every firm.

It’s night and day.

Nothing looked like an iPhone before the iPhone. Everything looked like the iPhone afterwards.

The phone in your pocket, the phone you use a hundred times a day and now feels part of your life –– whether it’s iPhone or Android –– is the way it is, is the use it is, because of that 2007 iPhone launch and its success.

In 2007, though, and also 2008, 2009… Apple was mocked for the iPhone. They were mocked for every part that was different to previous phones, such as how they don’t have physical keyboards. Literally laughed at. Everyone was focused on what had been a success in mobile phones and everything Apple did that was different, was therefore wrong.

I’m suddenly minded of something totally different. I remember a series of columns in Radio Times where the writer, a key figure on that magazine, regularly moaned how every TV drama was exactly the same. She had a point, she made good points, then she blew it. Because one week there was a drama that was different and she criticised it for not being the same.

Not every new idea is going to work. Not every new idea is good. This week the short-form video service Quibi shut down and I don’t miss it in the slightest, I didn’t like what they did, but they tried something new and they didn’t try it based on what everyone watched yesterday.

I love technology but I also have exactly no interest in technology. What I love is what it enables. You and I get to talk like this because of technology. I deeply love that having now made fifty YouTube videos, I can see how much tighter my scriptwriting is. I profoundly love hearing someone laugh and knowing it was because of how precisely I positioned a shot in the video, I mean how I put it at the one moment, the one frame, where it would be funny.

No question, whatever my comic timing is, it’s informed by everything I’ve watched and read and heard before.

But I am never trying to be like anything I’ve seen before. I think the real problem this music technology firm has is just that it’s completely wrong. The aim of a musician, of a writer, of an artist, is not to produce something that makes cash. We want that, we need that to survive, but if your sole purpose is to make cash, there are a lot easier ways than writing.

I write to find something new. Everything you create, you do to find something new. Now if only we could get Hollywood to work the same way.

Three iPhones

Appy days are here again

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Okay, I’m not sure where I’m going with this but bear with me for a sec.

So far this morning I’ve pitched for some work and got rejected. I read a Modern Family script. Experimented again with microwaving poached eggs. Checked all my appointments for the day, got train tickets, got bus tickets. Advised my sister-in-law about her smartphone. Read the news. Checked the weather for London where I’m going now.

On the train I’ll re-read all the documents for a meeting, I’ll write some notes. I need to do some banking bits so I’ll fit that in somewhere. I really need to write at least some of a theatre programme. I want to write part of a play.

And on my way home tonight I want to outline a non-fiction book but I’ll be knackered and I expect I’ll watch an episode or two of Frasier instead.

Here’s the thing, though. I expect I’ll take meeting notes on my iPad but everything else, I got from my phone.

That’s including the poached egg recipe which I’ve saved in an iPhone cookery app called Paprika. It doesn’t just include buying the train and bus tickets, it includes waving the phone at barriers and inspectors. I forgot to say that I figured out which bus to take by using Citymapper.

I like that I forgot. I am startled by how much our phones can do and how they are tightly knitted into our lives.

But what I like most is that I forgot I’d used my phone for that route planning and that I didn’t really notice I was using my phone for any of this until I stopped to think about you. Yes, I’m writing to you on my phone.

That we can have one teeny device that will do all these things is stunning. But the fact that we can do it, that I can think of you and immediately be talking with you, that I can need a ticket and get one, that’s wonderful.

Usually it’s nature that people tell me I am failing to appreciate. Just today, I’m choosing to appreciate our phones.

Except it’s 09:30 and my bloody battery is dying.

Three iPhones

Seven hundred and four thousand

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I learned a lesson from last week when I called our chat “58 Keys” and bemoaned, even belaboured, how much I loathe starting a sentence with a digit. Writer Garrie Fletcher pointed out that I could’ve written it as “Fifty-Eight Keys” instead.

I considered his point and concluded: “Bugger.”

So here we are with seven hundred and four thousand. I didn’t intend to use digits in any form this time: if I were planning to use digits again, I really think I should be talking your phone number and dialling it. Why in the world we don’t just talk over the phone or better yet over a tea, I have no idea.

But it’s funny I should say the word phone. It’s almost as if I planned this. For yesterday, 29 June, was the tenth anniversary of the iPhone going on sale. Or rather, going on sale in America: it didn’t come to the UK until 10 November 2007. Which makes today not the tenth anniversary but the 9 years, 7 months and 20 days anniversary. It’s the 502 weeks and 6 days anniversary. It’s the 9.64 years anniversary. It’s the 3,520th day’s anniversary and yes, I used Wolfram Alpha to work that out.

I’m a bit more vague on two other numbers. Some number of years ago, I was doing a thing where either I was paid to see how often I used my iPhone on an average day or possibly it was a really average day and I was just very bored. Not sure. I’m also not sure what the number was. But I think it was about 200. That includes just picking the thing up to see the time and it probably doesn’t including making phone calls because – look at you and me – we never ring anyone anymore.

I’ve got a feeling that there’s some academic study that says iPhone users average somewhere around 200 uses a day. The Daily Mail says it’s 85 times but look at that source again, we can rule that out. Last year Apple said iPhones are typically unlocked around 80 times per day but the number of times I unlock it to do one thing and put it down again are few. A research firm I’ve never heard of before, dscout, says Android users touch their phone 2,617 times per day.

So I think my estimate that I use my iPhone 200 times daily is reasonable, maybe conservative. But that means that since they came out, I’ve used mine 704,000 times.

This is a device that didn’t exist a decade ago and now you never intentionally leave home without it. For about eight of those ten-ish years, I did not once leave it behind anywhere. Since I’ve had an Apple Watch, I’ve left my phone at home or in the car maybe a dozen times. Never deliberately, but still its demon lock on me is loosening.

Still, look at this thing. I’ve never written a book on one but I have written articles – I do a weekly Writers’ Guild opinion column and the latest one was written, edited and sent entirely from my phone – and I doubt there’s a book I’ve worked on that I didn’t write something for on it. Maybe a draft chapter. Absolutely without question some notes of some kind as I’ve been doing research.

I first read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice on my phone. So that means I can’t have come to Austen until this last decade. She’s a bit life-changing all by herself: I’ve read her other novels since and I’ve re-read P&P and I’ve aspired to write as well as she did. Because of my phone.

Very early on, I remember stepping onto a train to Edinburgh while making corrections to a Radio Times article. I’ve sat on the London Underground making really fiddly corrections to PDF invoices that I then emailed as soon as I got up to street level. And got paid an hour later.

I’ve tutted at it when Apple Maps couldn’t find a place I needed. Then shortly afterwards I have sworn like a docker when Google Maps was able to find the place yet I then couldn’t find how to make the damn thing start the directions to there.

Oh! Sitting in a carpark near Birmingham City University, doing photo editing. I cannot recall what in the world I could’ve been editing, but it was for a job, it was for publication and it was for right now, please. I could do quite remarkable Photoshop-style work in my car using Pixelmator instead of driving home to my office to use actual Photoshop on my Mac.

Three weeks ago, driving in to Hull and telling my phone to play Misterioso by Thelonious Monk and it doing so. My car filled with the sound of this music that was appropriate to my job that day but which I don’t have, I’ve never owned.

Over these ten years, writing has changed and the job of a writer has expanded to cover so many other things. All of them needing, using, stretching the same writing muscles and so very many of them needing, using, stretching my iPhone.

Mind you, I’ve had an iPhone for 3,520 days so that would be just about 3,520 times that the bloody battery’s run out before the end of the day.

RIP iPhone 5: 2012-2015

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The last thing I expected Self Distract to become is a diary. But I just looked up a piece from September 2012 and you could argue that it’s not a Dear Diary entry, but it is. J’queues Apple was about buying an iPhone 5 and it was a proper enough, standalone enough, non-diary-enough entry that a magazine bought it. I remember their buying it paid a bit toward the cost of the iPhone 5.

But there’s the thing: I read the piece and I remember that. I can remember the face of someone I describe in it, I can feel the coldness of the day. I didn’t actually buy the phone that same day, I came back the next I think, chiefly because of the queue. I can see that queue: 1,600 people in a line. Do take a read some time: I think I make some good points about how yes, it is silly to queue for a phone but it’s the good kind of silly and no, it’s not the result of marketing hype. The summary is that maybe, maybe you can get 1,600 people though a marketing effort but you can’t get them twice. They won’t come back if the thing isn’t worth their queuing. This was the fifth time people queued for an iPhone, we’re not that stupid.

Only, the reason I looked this entry up is because yesterday, that iPhone 5 of mine died. If you have even passed me in the street during these last three years, you’ve seen me using that phone. Given the figures from once when I wrote about how often people use their phone and researched my own usage one day, it looks like I probably used my iPhone 5 in some way 233,220 times from its purchase to its death.

That’s 9.6 times per hour. It’s once every 6.25 minutes.

And I’m sure that’s wrong. I’m sure that is far, far too low a figure. My business ran through that iPhone, my life ran through it.

And I think what makes me sad about the iPhone dying is that it represented a particularly key slice of my business and life. Also a little growing up for me: I can see in that old entry that I was no longer automatically updating each time an iPhone came out, I was judging it, assessing the money, I was thinking about it. I was buying, but I was thinking about it more first.

Which all grew to the point where I did not buy an iPhone 6 when they came out even though my two-year phone contract was up. I couldn’t afford it, the price next to what difference it made just wasn’t worth it. Plus for the first time there were serious options in the iPhone: there were two models, each much bigger in your hand than my iPhone 5 and lots of reasons to go either way. I looked into it and I realised I simply wasn’t enjoying looking into it.

So for the first time since I think 1997, certainly the first time since 2007 when the original iPhone came out, I finished my two-year contract and did not go on to another one. It was the most financially astute thing I’ve ever done because I was paying about £42/month for the phone plus (sort of) unlimited 4G. Once the two years were up and because I specifically went in to say oi, why do you think I’m going to carry on paying you for the phone that I’ve now completely paid off, I got a new (sort of) unlimited 4G plan for £18/month.

I felt like a hard-hearted, cold negotiating businessman and it felt rather good. That plan is the least I have ever paid for a phone and there it was, all the data I could use, more talking minutes in the monthly plan than there are actually minutes in the month. Plus it was using my now beloved iPhone 5.

For beloved, do read beloved but also read used. Heavily used. Say excessively: I don’t mind and I wouldn’t disagree.

But heavily used does come with a price. The very day I bought it and the Apple sales man or woman put it in my hand, I dropped it. I dropped it because was so unexpectedly light that you had to adjust to holding it.

I don’t know how many times I’ve dropped it since: I didn’t and I don’t think it was very many, but it did happen. It just didn’t happen recently and yet for the past two months, I’ve been seeing big problems. The front glass presses in where it shouldn’t. The whole phone has taken to randomly restarting – and when it did that, I felt lucky because in a few minutes it would be back. Other times it would just lock up entirely. That was a giant problem when I was driving somewhere I didn’t know. Better that the phone crashed than the car did, but still.

Yesterday morning my iPhone 5 randomly restarted – and never stopped. It stayed on the restarting screen for an hour. It would be more but I had a gig to go to so I drove off to that and got lost without Siri. Checked the yes-still-dead-dammit phone a couple of times during the day, set up a thing for a friend on his iPhone 6 – and held it rather lustily, a working iPhone, imagine that – and worked out how many calls, emails, texts, Facebook messages and tweets I was missing. “I just tweeted you,” said another friend at this event. “MY IPHONE ISN’T WORKING” I replied, calmly.

I drove to the Apple Store after the gig and I bought an iPhone 6.

Reluctantly. There are still reasons to choose one model over the other but for the first time buying the phone wasn’t pleasure, it was entirely business. A business necessity rather than something fun. Striding in to the Apple Store and saying hello to the first person working there. (Her name is Davinia, she was smart and clever and funny and I enjoyed the 40 minutes or so I spent talking with her.)

But for the first time there was no savouring the purchase, there was no pondering which model and which size to get. I need that one in this size and I don’t like white, I’m not keen on gold, I’ll take the Space Grey one, please.

If you think it odd to write one Self Distract about excitedly buying an iPhone 5 and another about reluctantly buying the iPhone 6, I’d pretty much have to agree. Given that this is a eulogy to the 5, you have more of a point. Given that I’m also sounding right miserable about doing it, your point knows no bounds.

But the eulogy is fair, I think. I’m not the man I was in 2012 but I am a man who has been having the creative time of his life since then. That’s not because I bought an iPhone 5, this isn’t a commercial, but work and career and life have become radically more fulfilling over the time I had that phone. Not always paying enough, I am freelance, but creative and fulfilling in spades. Since September 2012 I’ve done 186 public speaking events of various kinds and my iPhone has been at the lot of them.

That 2012 Self Distract entry got bought by Macworld magazine – or iPhone World, I’m blank now, sorry – and in 2015 I am writing for MacNN.com. I just delivered my 293rd piece for them since December last year and it was the first that I’d done using an iPhone 6.

I’ve changed and so have iPhones. This 6 is even lighter than the 5 – I did exactly and precisely the same thing when Davinia handed the box to me and I got the phone out, I dropped it because it was so much lighter than my hands expected. It’s also faster than I expected. The screen is rather gorgeous. I had a fun time last night remembering what apps I had on the front screen and getting them back there again plus adding another row.

And when we’re done talking, I’ll be using this iPhone to direct me to my first meeting of the day. I’ll make notes on the way, I may make notes during the meeting. There’s a strong chance I’ll listen to Apple Music en route – that’s another change since the 5, I haven’t put any music on the phone at all this time yet I’ve got 30,000,000 tracks on it.

And there is unfortunately the very greatest of chances that I will set up the damn health and exercise stuff on this bloody machine. It will count how many steps I take, it will count the number of times I go up and down the stairs. It will not notice how much tea I drink or chocolate I eat, though, so there’s that.

I didn’t want to buy the phone now, I at least wanted to wait until I could enjoy choosing one and I particularly didn’t want to buy when we’re at most two months away from the next model, the iPhone 6s. That will be better in some way or other but I will never know because I won’t look. So there.

Yet it is a startlingly fast and fun phone to use. I feel bad about being reluctant to buy it. I feel rather good that this is what will be with me about 10 times an hour from now on. And I’ll tell you that the pleasure of being back with a working phone is tremendous. So tremendous that it isn’t even dented by the sheer bleedin’ volume of emails I’ve got to answer.

Keep me from them, just for a little longer. Can I buy you a coffee?