Immobile and loving it

I have a confession. Several years into the 21st century I don't have a mobile phone. Yet. It's not that the thought hasn't crossed my mind. I often notice that if I had a mobile I could call whoever about whatever, whenever. But I also often notice people not really concentrating on what I'm saying because they're busy pressing buttons on their mobile. Sending a text? Turning it off? Desperately wishing I'd leave them alone?

Then there's the way conversations always begin with 'I'm on the train.' Followed by 'I'll be at ____ station in about ten minutes' when you know you'd either need to travel faster than the speed of light or invent a time machine to manage that. For instance, when everyone on my course decided to swap phone numbers in what threatened to turn into a horrible snowstorm of reply-to-all emails I was the only one with a sweet little tied-to-the-hearth landline number. Just me. By myself. Unique. One-of-a-kind. Or unpopular, out of touch and jealous. But there's hope. An educational video might yet reform me.



I've been trying to reduce, reuse, recycle. Reduce probably means as a minimum not getting a mobile. Their manufacture and disposal doesn't have a great environmental reputation. By the way, did you know you can donate your old mobile to Oxfam? I've completed my first ever sale on ebay – hurrah! It's amazing how proud you can feel to offload an ink cartridge you can't use any more. Our printer broke and there are no replacement parts available. You can still get replacement parts for my in-laws' ancient cine-camera and the projector, but not for a five-year-old printer. Shame on you, Hewlett Packard. Our new printer is NOT made by you. Okay, maybe I should have reduced and not replaced, but trying to write assignments without a printer meant taking a lot of trips to the printer in our church office – I was desperate to see it all spread out in front of me. I'm trying to sell the broken printer on ebay for spare parts, but no luck so far.

More promising is that I've been approved to run a Freecycle™ group for my area. With Freecycle™ you give away unwanted things to people who can use them. There's one really important rule - everything has to be free. I'm enjoying making mental lists of all the things we have cramming the loft that I could give away rather than store indefinitely or dump, once I've quit wasting time online. Hm. This could be quite a long project.