IF YOU DON’T ANSWER, I’LL JUST RING IT OFF THE WALL [136]

There appears not to have been a time before the mobile phone or, if there was, it exists in an alternative reality, one where Biff Tannen did not turn the Hill Valley courthouse into a casino. More seriously, the mobile phone has changed how we live, changed our habits, and changed our infrastructure. Like with the World Wide Web, I will be one of the last, at age thirty-five, to remember a time without them.

I had to remind myself of how I used to keep in touch – I actually remember once having to wait until somebody finished using a payphone before I could make my own call, using my pre-paid BT Phonecard. That all changed in 2000 when, ahead of my seventeenth birthday, I bought my first mobile phone, just as they started becoming affordable to everyone. By that year, just over half of UK adults had one.

I’m not sure why I bought the phone I did, but I guess I recognised the name “Philips” more than “Nokia,” who made the phones everyone else had at the time. The Philips Savvy was introduced in 1999, and was a chunky black and blue brick of a basic phone. Its big buttons make it clear it has only one use – cameras were not commonplace on phones for another five years.

If I wasn’t using it to call or send an SMS message – the manual confirms SMS stands for “Short Message Service” - the other reason I had the Savvy in my hand was to unscrew and screw in its external aerial, as a way of keeping your hands busy. Unlike the black slate smartphones for today, if I broke the aerial, I could just buy a new one, and I could replace the battery with a new one, or one I charged earlier, or one with a bigger capacity, which needed its own bigger back cover. Standby time was measured in days, but you could only do so much with the Savvy.

With no information available on internal storage capacity, saving contacts, SMS messages and call history appears to be down to the SIM card only. Details of the last twenty calls you made, and the last ten you received, is the most you can have. No internet service is possible, but you do get a calculator and stopwatch. The LCD screen had space for two lines of text and an icon – the home screen displayed the time using a clock face. There is a primitive pre-emoji list of twenty-five characters you can send with SMS messages, but only an emoticon is sent if the recipient doesn’t have the same phone as you. Short pre-prepared SMS messages are provided, like “please call me back, or “I will be late” – the first such message had only been sent in 1992, over the Vodafone network, and people were not expected to take time writing long messages. The only other “app” was a “biorhythm calendar,” using your birthday and a given date to show your results for Chance, Love, Energy and Success. Amuse your friends, if you can.

In the year 2000 alone, payphone use declined by 12% in the UK – BT responded by increasing the minimum call charge for the first time since 1984, from 10p to 20p, and began charging for directory enquiry calls. BT Phonecards were withdrawn in 2002, except within the prison service. From the peak of 92,000 phone boxes in 1992, there are now only 40,000 on UK streets, with BT expecting to halve that total by 2022.

For all its limitations, I used my Philips Savvy for four years, longer than any other phone I had since. I finally joined the Nokia brigade in 2004 with a 3510i, an updated version of one of the first phones to have a colour screen, and 2007 established the two-year contract pattern to which practically everyone follows. Today, speaking as the owner of a phone that insists on using glass, it would be nice to use a phone I can drop, or throw, with abandon.

WHO SAYS A MISS WAS MADE TO KISS? [28]

I refrained from writing about Donald John Trump two weeks ago, when the US Presidential election race finally ended, because the prevailing mood in the United States was too raw, and too polarising, to make light of the situation, and no-one from the land of Brexit can realistically make light of political problems elsewhere.

However, comedy is described as tragedy plus time, and Trump is described alternately as Charles Foster Kane and Biff Tannen, despite winning a Golden Raspberry Award for Best Supporting Actor in the 1990 Bo Derek film “Ghosts Can’t Do It,” where he played himself.

The comparisons with “Citizen Kane” endure, especially when Trump was asked about it, in 2002, by the documentary maker Errol Morris, for an unfinished film. Trump recognised the theme of wealth not being everything, and how it isolates you from people. However, the subsequent focus on his comments is regarding the montage of scenes between Kane and his first wife, over a breakfast table that progressively puts more distance between them. “Perhaps I can understand that—the relationship that he had was not a good one for him,” Trump says.

From behind the camera, Morris asks, "If you could give Charles Foster Kane advice, what would you say to him?"

“Get a different woman.”

Trump also thought that people did not understand the meaning of the “Rosebud” sledge because that was the name used: “Perhaps if they came up with another word that meant the same thing, it wouldn't have worked… But Rosebud works."

Trump also spoke, in an interview with Mark Singer for “The New Yorker” magazine in 1997, about his favourite film being “Bloodsport,” a 1988 martial arts film starring Jean Claude Van Damme. However, he charged his son Eric with fast forwarding past the exposition and dialogue, to see just the action. “You want to write that Donald Trump was loving this ridiculous… movie, but are you willing to put in there that you were loving it, too?” Would his opinion have changed if he saw all of it?

Regardless of whether his words helped him become President-elect, so many of Donald Trump’s words, said over months, years, could have gone unsaid, and more people could have thought more of his words. However, the bleak museum of Twitter means we no longer have that option. “Publish and be damned,” the Duke of Wellington said in 1825, but online, posting your own words may bite you in the behind, sometimes immediately.

For Trump, his impulsive use of Twitter makes him a very easy figure to satirise, when what he says defy you to take them seriously. Calling “Saturday Night Live” a “totally one-sided, biased show,” he wanted equal time to respond. For Trump-mirror Alec Baldwin to point out the election is over, “there is no more equal time,” and that we must now respond to his actions as President, reveals a disconnect between the thoughts of a private man, that have to be replaced by the considered pronouncements of a public figure, for there must be no risk of conflating the two of them.

The farrago over “Hamilton,” a hip-musical about a Founding Father, turned very quickly from the booing of the Vice President-elect, Mike Pence, who was in the audience, over to Trump’s condemnation of the “overrated” musical’s cast for “harassing” Pence, in the same manner he berated protestors, “incited by the media,” before acknowledging they “have passion for our great country” – one wrong tweet, one moment too late. That Pence was the diplomat, stopping to listen to the cast’s impassioned speech, insisting later that he took on their message, while telling his son that the boos are “what freedom sounds like,” shows that his job as Vice President is to act as a “superego” for a man that never previously needed one.

(I love that Trump thinks the theatre “must always be a safe and special place,” a point not lost on Arthur Miller, writer of “Death of a Salesman,” or Abraham Lincoln, for that matter.)

Six months ago, I began “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” by talking about how Yoko Ono overrode the original reason for The Beatles being given their name, in favour of John Lennon’s joke remark about a dream, involving a man on a flaming pie. An underlying theme of life, to me at least, is to be careful when people impose their thoughts upon you, make sure to question their motives, and look for evidence.

Donald Trump will be President of the United States from 20^thJanuary 2017, and the weight of that office demands respect. However, the holder of that office cannot afford to be given the benefit of the doubt, especially when Trump has never appeared to need it before. He will be given the opportunity to govern in the way he sees fit, but he will be under constant scrutiny, for every single decision, for every public utterance, for the rest of his life...

Good luck to us all, whoever we are, wherever we are, whatever he does, whatever we do.