He’s on the Phone… Not

I was trying to think. The last time I was at university, what did I do for a telephone? I pondered this long and hard, and finally came to a rather astounding conclusion. This conclusion is astounding because in subsequent years, my mobile has become rather a part of me. It told me the time, it woke me up in the morning, there was text messaging… So yeah, apparently in the four years I was at university in England, I owned a mobile phone for the first two years only. After I went home for the summer in 2001, I did not renew the package. In other words, I was incommunicado as far as phones went for the best part of two years.

Indeed, I recall in my last year as I did my last MA (which I thought was my first and only MA), I called the parents from a pay phone in the university square. And I remember calling my brother to find out if my neice was born from a pay phone around the corner from my house… the previous year. And no, none of the places I stayed in had a house phone. I remember this because I tried to install one and it was rejected because the previous occupants of the house had managed to blacklist the address and I couldn’t be bothered changing that.

I find this frankly unbelievable. How the hell did I keep in touch with people? Email, I presume, or blind faith. Gah!

Anywho, apologies for the silence. As you can see, I am back, and apparently without a phone. This is because I finally put into action my exit strategy and landed up in Canada, not without difficulty though. It’s good to know that some exit strategies work. For a while though, I thought I was destined to end up wallowing in my little corner(s) of Sri Lanka forever. We’re here though. In Canada. Have been for a couple weeks, and practically everyone who reads this wee blog already knows that anyway. IToday nonetheless seems as appropriate a day as any to pop out the champagne (or Moosehead Beer) and re-launch TLF.

And nothing more appropriate to relaunch things than a little bit of Saint Etienne:

Thanks be to here.