Mark Andrews: Contentment is a 25-year-old flip-phone

As far as I can see, it looks like one of those crystal earpieces you used to plug into the transistor radio when I was a kid. Only it comes in a box with flowers painted on it, and costs 60 nicker. That's this year's Christmas presents sorted then.

The same press release also includes something that looks like one of those lanterns people used to take on camping holidays to help them find the toilet at night. But this one doubles up as a 'VQ Halo Bluetooth speaker with powerbank', and costs 70 quid. Which I think means it's a lantern that plays music.

It's things like this that make me question whether I am really out of step with the rest of mankind. Or maybe I'm just in awe of the marketing genius that has managed to convince a significant swathe of Millennials that what they really want in their lives is a musical torch.

Further proof that the world is leaving me behind came this week, when it was reported how people are flocking to St Peter's Basilica at the Vatican to take selfies of themselves in front of the Pope's body. Now I'm pretty squeamish about dead bodies at the best of times, but surely even P T Barnum would have raised eyebrows at the idea of folk taking pictures of themselves in front of a corpse, and then publishing them on social media? One of the newspapers even showed a picture of a grown man holding his infant daughter aloft on his shoulders, giving her a better vantage point to capture the Pope's body on her smartphone. What sort of values is that young lady going to grow up with?

The irony is that I write this in the middle of a kind of enforced digital detox of my own, since my phone - and only personal source of internet access - packed up last week. I always saw myself as a bit of a tech rebel, someone determined not to follow the crowd and become a slave to my phone. Much to the irritation of my colleagues when they wanted to contact me on the move, I stubbornly refused to join the mobile phone revolution of the 1990s. We did have an office mobile, for the duty reporter to take out on night call, but it was several months before I realised you actually had to switch it on to receive calls. I got my first smartphone in 2014, which I have gradually accepted as a useful tool in my everyday life, but I never thought I would become one of those sad people who become anxious at very thought of a couple of weeks off grid. 

Until now. 

When my phone stopped working at the start of last week, I do what I always do in these situations. Naff all. 

Pretend it's not a problem, and hopefully it will go away. But when it became clear that my Motorola was not going to amazingly return to life, I trudged around town trying to find someone to fix it. I knew my phone provider's shop would be a waste of time: I had tried it before, and they told me it was 'time for an upgrade', which is trade-speak for 'we want to flog you another phone'. After being turned away by the first couple of shops advertising phone repairs, the third one I tried put it onto some kind of diagnostic tool. Still, it refused to play ball, not even having the life in it to throw up any fault codes that might identify what was wrong with it. 

"Leave it with us overnight," said the lady in the shop, as she wrote out a lengthy receipt. This must be what it feels like when you leave your pet with the vet. The following day, I was told my phone was continuing to defy all efforts at diagnosis, and maybe I should come back in a couple of days. 

The downside of this was that my exile from the worldwide web came days before my car insurance was due for renewal. In ye olden days I would have spent several days telephoning different brokers to compare quotes, but nobody does that these days, do they? It's all meerkats, opera singers and comparison sites, and I'm no different. But still, after half an hour on the blower, I managed to get it sorted. 

In a way, it's all been quite liberating. I remember being appalled when a younger colleague once told me her life was on her phone, but it is only through being separated from my smartphone for a couple of weeks that I have come to realise how much time I spend mindlessly checking for emails or text messages. It's been good not having to worry about this.

I still haven't gone back to the shop to retrieve my phone. Partly because I'm pretty sure they would have contacted me by now if they had been able to fix it. Partly because I haven't really had the time. But most of all, because when they tell me they can't fix it, they will want me to return the 25-year-old flip-phone they lent me.

Which got me thinking. If parents, schools and government are concerned about the damage smartphones are doing to youngsters, why doesn't some savvy entrepreneur start marketing these old phones as a retro-cool fashion accessory. Maybe even those great big briefcase-sized ones like Bergerac used to have.

After all, if they can do it with camping lanterns and crystal earpieces....