I rang my phone company to ask if I was due an upgrade. Two years overdue apparently. I knew it was an old phone but hadn’t quite figured. This phone, as it turns out, was the last-ditch effort to fend off the Minority Report future of screens and holograms: a Blackberry Classic, Classic in as much as it has a keypad. Alas now it is relegated and no more.

I had defined myself by it in some way, I had to. Inadvertently it had become a statement phone moving from an office into work with a younger crowd, who laughed and scoffed as though I had pulled out a pager or an unwieldy butt-plug – fucking millennials and their in-group conformity.

The reason for liking buttons, not just a dialpad but an entire QWERTY keypad replete with symbols and signs, is the feeling of permanence when you type, the analogue feeling of having performed an action with a beginning and an end. Swiping and screen-typing feels so perfunctory and pathetic, each action blurring into the next and just asking be ignored. The physical intersection, my fingertip pressing into the phone, as opposed to bouncing off of a flat surface, feels more real.

At least these were the thoughts and feelings that I told others and myself as I resisted the screen-based future that steadily proved itself inevitable. Even Noddy has himself an iPad for fucksake. Now I’ve upgraded to an old touchscreen which costs nothing and my bill has been cut in half. That was what motivated me but now I realise that the typing mechanism is a lot more intuitive than I had supposed it to be, and not only that, the fluid impermanence allows me to type so much quicker.

What I find so amusing about this is how I had my reasons initially, and then I just repeated them without thinking, without questioning, and stayed in my bubble until I found myself being proudly ignorant. Ah well, progress.