An Irishman's Diary

THE largest category of phone-calls now made from my domestic landline, I worked out recently, involves various family members ringing their mobiles, to find out where they are. Maybe that’s what you call “ironic”. In any case, the ability to locate free-range phones is the landline’s last real claim to relevancy, although I’m not sure this justifies the line-rental: an even bigger dinosaur than the handset itself.

To some extent, the situation has become self-perpetuating. Because you know you can find your mobile by ringing it, there’s no incentive to develop systems whereby you will mislay it less frequently. On the contrary, your carelessness is almost rewarded by that little feeling of empowerment when the fugitive phone is found. Depending on where it turns up, there can even be a frisson of excitement.

Mobile phones ringing in unexpected places are now a favourite plot device in film thrillers: Scorsese's The Departedbeing one example. In fact, I'm not certain members of my family don't lose their phones deliberately so they can enjoy the tension of listening for the muffled ringtone, as it emerges from – where? OMG! – that box of coco-pops they were munching earlier.

No, ringing the mobile doesn’t work if, while it’s mislaid, the battery runs out. In which vein, it’s a bit of a lapse by mobile designers that, however smart their products are, they do not have some sort of “soul” that would survive the battery’s loss of life, if only to allow you to ring it. But no doubt Steve Jobs is working on such a telepathy app as we speak. He’ll probably call it the iContact.

In the meantime, I wish the landline’s ability to locate mobiles would extend to all the other things you lose: car keys, the TV remote, your toothbrush, half of every pair of socks you own, etc. These should all have in-built microchips with numbers you can call. And when you can’t find the list of numbers, you should be able to ring that too.

In our house it would be useful, occasionally, to be able to ring the cat. As readers may know, we were adopted (reluctantly) by the animal some years ago, after she’d been abandoned. And it’s bad enough that, now, we have to worry about who’ll feed her when we’re on holidays. But this year, she almost caused us to miss the plane.

The problem was that the cat sometimes finds her way into the house, or is invited in by small, two-legged collaborators, who then forget about her. Thus forgotten, she has a nasty habit of seeking out quieter corners, like an upstairs bedroom, and falling asleep there until she needs to go to the bathroom: whereupon she may find that we’ve all gone out somewhere, or perhaps left the country, as humans are annoyingly apt to do.

The day were were heading for the airport – cutting it fine, as usual – we suddenly remembered that no one had seen the cat all morning. So even though time was scarce, I was forced into a room-by-room inspection: not just visual but aural too, listening for purring noises from laundry baskets and under beds. How much easier if I’d been able to just call a number? Although, in the nervous moments before we caught the plane, there was only one part of the cat’s anatomy I wanted to ring, and it wouldn’t have required a phone.

GREAT man as he was, Steve Jobs also shares responsibility for popularising the adjective ic*n*c, which is now so ubiquitous that this column has been forced to campaign for a ban. First he gave thousands of ic*ns (many of them former Russian religious pictures, laid off under communism) new careers on his graphic user interfaces. Then he spent a lifetime inventing highly distinctive products which would have been called “ic*n*c” even if their names didn’t all begin with an I.

Sure enough, the adjective was everywhere in his obituaries yesterday, applied to him and his and creations alike. And it wouldn’t have been so objectionable in that context – there is a quasi-religious element to the Apple community, after all – if it weren’t so hideously hackneyed already.

I was talking to a friend in public relations recently who admitted that he and his colleagues were well aware of the word’s overuse in press releases. The trouble is that customers now demand it. If a client’s rival has already had his ugly pre-fab shopping centre described as “ic*n*c”, why should the client settle for having his new formica-clad asbestos factory described as anything less?

Nevertheless, there are signs of hope for our campaign. To wit, earlier this week, I was one of several speakers at the unveiling of a Brian O’Nolan commemorative stamp. Which was, vis-a-vis the dreaded adjective, a high-risk event: involving as it did an artistic representation of the head of a revered figure and talking place as it did in Bewley’s, whose famous windows we have discussed in this connection before.

Even so, as the last speaker – one Val O'Donnell – finished his piece, he pointed out that the entire proceedings had passed without the I-word being used once. Which just goes to show, it can be done. And in the circumstances, I'm only too happy to give Val the shameless plug he requested for his stage adaptation, The Bother with the Brother, starring Aidan Jordan, which continues at Bewley's Cafe Theatre every lunchtime until October 15th.