Farewell, trusty flip... I’m a smartphone groupie now

In the end, it felt more like a whim than a decision. I had gone to the Eir shop because my old “builder’s phone” had died — peacefully, at home — and I needed to replace it. Maybe I wasn’t fully “in the moment” on a Monday morning, but after a brief negotiation with the Eir person, I found myself signing up to the ownership of a smartphone — a Samsung Galaxy, whatever that is. When I say “negotiation”, she asked if I wanted the same kind of phone or maybe another kind, and I thought about it for a few seconds and went for the other kind.

Thus ended all the years in which I had held out against overwhelming odds; all the years in which I did not have a smartphone, for no specific reason except perhaps some obscure instinct — a feeling deep down that when a large crowd is heading in one direction, maybe you should hang back for a while.

I’m still somewhat baffled by the apparent ease with which I finally joined the crowd, thus ending one of the most remarkable and uplifting stories of defiance in this century.

But perhaps subconsciously I felt that the battle had already been won.

Imagine my sense of triumph recently, on reading that our old friends the hipsters had discovered something that a few of us had known for years — that the smartphone devours your life until you are walking around in a permanent state of addiction to the algorithms, and all the other machinations that Their Satanic Majesties in Silicon Valley have created to enslave humanity.

So the hipsters, fair play to them, figured that the way to go was backwards to the old Nokia phones which enabled you mainly to make phone calls and texts — without also enabling you to have, say, 25 grand on the 2.15 at Uttoxeter.

I was happy to welcome those hipsters to my world. I just couldn’t understand why it took them so long to get there.

If we acknowledge that for many people a smartphone is an absolute necessity that they must have at all times, we’re still left with a lot of people who have choices in this regard that they never really consider.

If you work from home, for example, you will certainly have some sort of a laptop which will keep you on the grid, allowing you to book your NCT, or even freeing you up to tweet about Liverpool Football Club.

As the hipsters eventually realised, you mightn’t need to be carrying this thing around with you every minute of your life — even if it meant missing vital experiences such as taking a picture of yourself with Ed Sheeran, if you bumped into him on the street.

I never felt you needed all that, as long as you had your basic builder’s flip-phone that made you feel like Captain Kirk every time you took it out to make a call. There is some part of me that would never cease to derive some small pleasure from flipping open that thing and thinking: “Beam me up, Scotty.”

Harmless eejitry, I know — but then some of us belong to that section of humanity which was born in medieval times, as it were, living a large proportion of our lives just watching Star Trek, rather than living in it.

There will never be people like us again, and on the whole we should consider ourselves lucky — those medieval times, as we knew them, could be extremely horrible, and if something really bad happened in the middle of the night, you might even have to run out to the nearest payphone and pray it wasn’t busted.

But if you were growing up in that primitive age, you could also make mistakes without becoming internationally notorious, and you weren’t in a state of constant anxiety that you’d missed something — like, what was there to miss?

Now with this growing awareness that the smartphone is destroying humankind, by finally getting one of them at this time, I am perhaps again taking the road less travelled.

Though I should add, that there is guilt in it, too. While a principled stance is admirable, sometimes your friends and loved ones have to suffer for your principles, too. For all the latest scores and the GPS-tracking and the flight-checking-in, I thank them.

As for my old flip-phone, frankly

I’m missing it already. I miss how light it was compared to this more solid and slippery object that has brought this strange new anxiety to my being — this sense that wherever I go, I owe it my attention.

I feel like a backpacker who is now travelling with a suitcase. And I’m about 10 times more worried that I’ll lose my phone than I used to be.

But hell, if I meet Ed Sheeran on the street, I’m ready.

Once upon a time, when watching Ireland was fun

Way back when supporting the Republic of Ireland could be a form of pleasure, one of the defining images of our first World Cup was of long lines of Irish people queueing outside phone boxes in Italy — many of them telling the folks back home that they’d be staying out there a while longer than expected, due to Ireland inadvertently reaching the quarter-finals.

The smartphone might have made their journey a bit easier in some ways, but it would surely have detracted from the epic grandeur of it all.

Indeed Nell McCafferty, who turned 80 last week, sent back these tremendous reports for the Pat Kenny radio show about Paddy’s march on Rome, in which she expressed admiration for how well our lads were behaving themselves. They weren’t “playing away” to any extent.

Though one fan, who couldn’t find a hotel room in Rome, had some kind of sexual experience with a Dutch woman in the catacombs.

We know this because, tormented with guilt, this man — who had been married for five years — “confessed” to Nell, who ruled that his remorse was genuine, told him to consider it a bonus, and absolved him.

Such scenes of rejoicing and self-discovery seemed very distant last Tuesday night, when Ireland again made us wonder if there’s a process whereby a country can announce its retirement from international football. Then we heard that the FAI had been talking to Roy Keane, and we figured we’d keep going for a while yet. But that too came to nothing.

There would have been karma in Ireland losing Declan Rice and Jack Grealish on Roy’s watch as assistant to Martin O’Neill, and then Roy coming back to deal with the consequences of that.

But for Roy to turn this around would not just be the greatest triumph of his career — it would be the greatest triumph of anyone’s career.

Nicklaus backs Trump – where did it all go wrong?

They can blow it all, too, the great ones. Until last weekend Jack Nicklaus was universally regarded as a giant of his game. Yet there he was at Mar-a-Lago, crowning Donald Trump as both the senior champion and the overall champion of his own club — the supreme leader of North Korea himself would shudder with embarrassment.

But Jack wasn’t just disgracing himself by confirming his endorsement of the demagogue.

Part of Jack’s legend was his sense of sportsmanship — there’s even a course called The Concession named after Jack “giving” a putt to Tony Jacklin to tie the Ryder Cup.

Now here he is, a living god of golf — famously “a game of integrity” — and he’s making this phony-baloney presentation to a man so notorious for cheating at the game that there’s an entire book written about it: Rick Reilly’s Commander in Cheat.

Next week the Saudis roll in to another Trump course with their

LIV tour, which PGA stalwart Jack now calls “a powerful addition to our game”.

Who knows what they’ll be presenting to the proprietor? Or what they might be getting in return?