Mobile phones and dads

I finally got a new mobile phone then. I went back to my original port of call - O2 in Newark - and dealt with the manager. She asked what my requirements were, I told her and I got a new phone. It's the Samsung Fonemaster 2000, or something. I told you I know bugger all about phones so that's what I ended up with, it does everything I want from a mobile phone. My original intention was for the iPhone, but although I've got the money, something doesn't feel quite right about forking out £350 for a mobile phone.

I think a lot of that has to do with my dad. I could just hear the sharp intake of breath when I told him how much this thing had cost me. "You mean you've spent that much on a phone that plays records?" is what he would have said (Dad didn't really 'do' music. Apart from Brass bands, Russ Conway and, in later years, The Beautiful South but I think that had more to do with the fact that somehow he'd found out that they were from Hull). Swiftly followed with "Your trouble is that you've got more money than sense." I can see his point, this phone's cost me less that half what the iPhone does and it does what I want it to.

Not that my dad had anything against gadgets, no sir. Dad loved gadgets but they had to have a practical application. Like a combined cigar cutter and egg cup, or trousers with a built-in lap tray. When we cleared my parents' house we found a miniature trundle wheel for running over road maps. I'm now the proud owner of that. In his later years he became obsessed with softening water. He spent pounds on those Brita water filters (he had the top-of-the-range, complete with digital readout) and cartridges. He followed this up with a thing that he put in the water inlet pipe which was supposed to soften the water. It ran on electricity. So he had all this gear to soften the water to save on kettles. He was spending pounds on water filters and electricity. I think that might be called a false economy.

That was Dad all over. I don't think he ever had a new lawnmower, I remember as a kid he had a Suffolk Punch, which I think he had given him. Then as his brothers started dying off he always ended up inheriting their old mowers. I once went to see them and there was Dad in the garden mowing the lawn with a petrol-driven mower that looked like it was going to run away with him. Attached to this mower was a jam jar. The mower would, every few seconds, violently spit out petrol. When I asked his what the jam jar was for he told me it was to catch the petrol. Why he didn't just go and get it repaired I'll never know. Or why he just didn't bite the bullet and buy himself a new, decent mower, I'll never know either. But, I suppose, that's quintessential daddery.

Getting back to the phones, the money I saved on the iPhone I can put to better use by buying a gorgeous drum kit that I'm drooling over in a local music shop. I wonder what Dad would have thought to something nice and genteel like playing the drums..?