Hanging on the telephone

I remember just 15 years ago saying in a conversation with a friend that there was no way I was going to jump onto the whole mobile phone bandwagon that was beginning to sweep the world.

My argument being that I'd managed just fine without one for 20 years and generations before us never needed them. What was so important that it couldn't wait until I got home and listened to my answer phone and called the person back?

Why did the world and its brother need to find me when I was trying on a pair of shoes at the mall or picking up the dry cleaning at my local laundrette?

It's no real surprise that less than a year later I was sporting the latest in modern technology - a brick by today's standards - and feeling very pleased with myself that the nice man down at the mobile phone place had let my friend and me choose from a VIP list of prized numbers.

Now I don't even have a land line at home and I wouldn't dream of going down to the local cold store without my phone in case something happens and I need to get in touch with someone.

Hey, I can change a tyre if I have to but my pretty manicured nails would rather I called a friend for help! The fact is I can't think of a single person I know that doesn't own a mobile phone.

A week ago I got home after picking my son up from school to walk into an ominously silent house. It took me a few seconds to register that the silence was due to the fact that the central AC wasn't doing its usual 'I'm-very-old-but-still-doing-my-best-to-keep-you-cool' rumble and when I tried switching the lights on nothing happened.

As it turned out the AC repair people were round the back of the house trying to fix it and had managed to switch the electricity off to avoid blowing themselves up.

All was well again within 20 minutes but the minor panic I felt at the fact that the electricity had gone only a couple of hours before the Ministry of Electricity would be shut for the weekend left me thinking about how unpleasant the weekend could have turned out to be.

A few days later I discovered that I'd run out of gas just as I was switching the oven on to cook dinner. My compound might be a little old and falling to pieces but the team that look after it are both friendly and organised and they had a spare gas cylinder to swap mine with and dinner was happily bubbling away 20 minutes later.

The simple fact of the matter is that we live in a world that makes it easy for us to get along with our day to day lives without too much hassle.

We need light, we flip a switch. We need water, we turn on a tap. We need food, we jump into our cars and go to a supermarket that gives us a very wide variety of tasty morsels to choose from or if we're feeling particularly lazy we just pick up the phone and have food delivered straight to the front door.

We can communicate with friends and family on the other side of the world with a few simple strokes of the key board or by simply pressing a few numbers on our mobile phones. Almost every single aspect of our lives depends on modern technology.

In truth we're totally spoiled and while we're vaguely aware that there are people around the world who don't have running water or electricity to make their lives easier, few of us can imagine what it would be like to go without.

How many of us would know how to survive if, God forbid, we had to?