I succumbed. I may have been one of the last in my age group to do so but, finally, I succumbed to peer pressure. I had intended to go, like a dinosaur, to my grave ignorant of the capabilities of smart phones. Hitherto, I had not considered myself important enough to warrant owning such modern paraphernalia  but I couldn’t fight it and now I am one of the zombies. Unwillingly at first, I responded to every strange sound that emanated from my new (but superseded) Samsung Galaxy 4.

“What’s that? An email, a text, my Whatsapp…?” I used to ask myself inside my head.

“It’s not mine,” Chris used to interrupt my thoughts as if he was a mind-reader, “mine sounds like a cuckoo and a wolf-whistle.”

“Well mine is a sheep and a type-writer bell, not a door bell!” I used to say time after time but occasionally the sound would be something else, like a waterfall, a woodpecker or a bicycle bell (and sometimes it really was just my bicycle bell making a funny noise as I went over bumps whilst out cycling).

Nowadays, willingly, Chris and I both respond to all the sounds simultaneously. We are more important and worldly now. Like robots, we stretch out our hands and check, after all, it could be something very important… Oh, just a spam email? Yes, but it might have been crucial – what if we hadn’t checked? I guess that our worlds might have fallen apart.