How did that happen?

The question has inevitably been asked - how on earth did I manage to do that to my phone?

Listen. It was like this.

I finally got back from a very long and wet day on Tuesday around 6.30pm. I was a bit of drowned rat, having been forced to walk the last mile-and-a-half home through the continuing downpour because of the non-availability of taxis.

I changed, made myself a nice hot mug of tea (English style, with milk), and began the ritual of checking the day's text messages on my phone. (Welcome to China: mobile-to-mobile calls, though probably still quite cheap by the standards of the developed world, are irksomely expensive in relation to the general level of prices we have become used to here [and you get charged for incoming calls too]; there is no voicemail; but text messages cost less than 1 cent each - so we communicate with each other almost entirely by SMS.)

Checking messages is a bit of a laborious process. It's a very old phone, with a tiny memory, which I have pretty much maxed out by storing 15 or 20 favourite funny or sentimental messages from the past year-and-a-bit I've been using it. Also, it automatically saves all outgoing messages (moderately useful on occasions, but more often just a pain in the arse), which adds to the memory overload. Thus, if I 'reply' to an incoming message, I immediately have to go back into the 'Inbox' to delete the message I've just replied to, and then into the 'Sent' folder to delete the reply I've just sent - otherwise, I soon run out of memory to receive or send any new messages. Like I said, a pain-in-the-arse. And my phone has to be switched off for most of the day (in classes, in the recording booth), so by the early evening I often have quite a backlog of messages to deal with.

So, there I am, on the sofa, wrangling messages, phone in left hand, mug of tea in right hand.... and, well, I suppose the phone's already a bit damp from all the rain that's fallen on me that day, and it gets kinda wriggly, slippery, and suddenly pops up out of my hand - like a bar of soap! - and somersaults through the air and plops into the tea 6 inches away.

There you have it. That's how I drowned my phone. Now, please, stop bugging me about it. It could have been any of us.

A couple of days ago I was being cautiously optimistic about my phone regaining full functionality; I thought that after a few more days the last traces of corruptive moisture inside would evaporate, and it would stop misbehaving. Well, maybe I should still give it a while longer; maybe that evaporation hasn't been able to happen yet because it's been so damned HUMID for the past couple of days. But things aren't looking good. The button response is all over the place; it's maddeningly glitchy; sometimes it crashes completely, and requires a switch off/switch on again to reset it; it's extremely fiddly to navigate through the menus; I can - just about - read my incoming messages, make and receive calls; but it's become completely impossible to send text messages.

I fear I will finally have to decommission the old girl and buy her replacement.

It's a poignant moment. I have been using this phone full-time myself for only the last 13 or 14 months, but I've had it now for over 38 months. A remarkable achievement in a country where the average lifespan of a mobile phone is said to be less than 6 months! I used to keep it as a 'spare', to lend to visiting friends: I bought it originally for my friend Lizzie, for her notorious visit here in April '04 (yes, one day there will probably be a whole slew of posts over on the Barstool about that epic 7 days); then my American girlfriend, The Buddhist, used it for about 6 months; I've also lent it (unwisely?) to my accident-prone best buddy, The Chairman, for a few weeks (during which it suffered more 'wear and tear' than in the whole of the rest of its history...... until the other day).

I fret that I won't now be able to find anything comparably BASIC. I don't want symphonic ringtones, I don't want to store my MP3 library, I don't want to take pictures, I don't want to check my e-mail, I don't want to watch video clips, I don't want to play '80s arcade games, I don't want to be able to record my bowel movements to use as a ringtone...... I just want a call function and a message function. My current phone doesn't even have a colour screen! I love it.

One day, Retro/Primitive phones will be in vogue; but not yet, I fear, not yet. I dread to think what kind of all-singing, all-dancing, I-speak-your-weight monstrosity I may have to accept as a replacement....