The joy of text

Ah, text messages. Little packets of electronic wisdom delivered directly to your pocket at random. Bite-sized chunks of news or gossip, events or invitations, trials, tribulations and wild speculation – and all in 160 characters or fewer. A bit like having your own personal postman on duty 24 hours a day, except without the need for a letter box or worry about your big hairy dog getting all over excited.

Like opening a letter – the handwritten sort with a proper stamp – receiving a text message carries with it that perceptible jolt of joyous intrigue. They even arrive complete with a little musical fanfare just to ramp up the excitement level a notch. Who will it be from? What will they be saying? And heaven forefend the anticipatory anxiety brought to pass by being temporarily unable to open the message and read it. The suspense is quite unbearable. So what if you’re in the middle of performing brain surgery; you’ve just got to see it now.

And so it was this evening that I was on the motorway on the way back to the barn - all aglow with vigour (or what passes for it on a drizzly Monday night) after two classes at the gym – when my phone bleeped with a message. So of course, after pausing for a nano second, I read it. (Yes, I know you’re not supposed to, but how could I resist? My mobile even has little flashing blue lights on it; ironic and totally irresistible). A message from my sister enquiring how it was all going with the barn move, answered with a hastily composed reply from me using one thumb and with half an eye on the road.

A few minutes later, the phone bleeped again. “You always do exceed in drama”, she’d written. A pause, before I replied “Do you really think so?” “A little,” she answered, “but I don’t think you court it; it seems to stalk you!”

I’ve been thinking about this since. Is that true? Is that how I really am? It’s certainly her view so it must be how she sees me; maybe others do too. I don’t think I see my life like that – in terms of a series of dramas that I leap to and from like Tarzan on his jungle vines – but the more thought I’ve given it, the more I can understand what she means. And I concede that she might well have a point.

I’m sure if I was a better person I’d be meditating on this right now. Perhaps I will – perhaps I am already – but in my own way, with tea and cigarettes and writing it down. And pondering too on the nature of how quite such an eye-opening insight could have been delivered to me on a tiny blue screen at 60mph.