So my dog died a few weeks ago. I know this because I had made a phone call and the person on the other end couldn’t hear me, as if she was Mutt and Jeff. I tried it again with a colleague in the neighbouring office to test it out, even if he was in the middle of eating a croissant, and he was Mutt and Jeff too, as was I. The dog had certainly died, and due to the length of time we’d spent together – 12 years – it was like losing a best friend, as in a dog is a man’s best friend.
When I’d bought that Nokia – the pioneers of mobile dogs - back in 2002 after losing about six others, mobile phones had only just come onto the market, as in the slip-in-your-pocket type of phone. Before then they had been massive great chunky things (see below) for which you needed a sturdy rucksack to carry it around in; either that or arms like a weightlifter.
Roger’s dad Harry was a long-distance lorry driver and often on the road, smoking roll-up cigarettes that he could assemble with one hand, all the while swearing a lot and leaving the coast clear for his son to announce at pub closing time on Saturday nights, “Right then! Back to mine!” to where we all trooped in an eager manner.
Not only had Roger bought a massive dog, but he’d also somehow acquired an elaborate water pipe, aka hubbly bubbly or bong, from India I seem to remember, although he’d never been there. He often acquired such items. It did come in handy though as an accessory to smoking the lump of wacky backy he usually kept on his person.
While we watched Platoon for the 37th time (“March man, in Tennessee. Sniff them pines, sniff that cross-mountain pussy, down by the river … wooh hot damn … mother fucker”) Pat Skillett took a copious lungful then inadvertently coughed back down the pipe sending bits and bobs flying everywhere including a good two litres of blackened water blasted like grapeshot from a blunderbuss smack into the wall above the fireplace. How we all howled and rolled about on the carpet and momentarily forgot those places where Roger’s kitten Bomber had pissed on. That same Bomber had once eaten a lump of hashish and spent the next 3 days asleep but that’s by the by because all of a sudden the door flew open and in walked Harry, Roger’s dad, who stood there bemused with a roll-up dangling from bottom lip. Surveying the scene and holding his lunch box he let go the immortal line, “Roger! What the fuck is going on!?” upon which we rolled around some more.
So when my dog died a few weeks back I was upset and sought to relieve that unhappiness by buying a new one, ending up with a new-fangled Sony contraption that I now wish Kim Jong Un had hacked along with Sony Pictures because the darned new dog, according to the salesman a “technological marvel”, is impossible to work out and I am barely able to send a text message despite it having a Sony Player, GPS, maps of the whole world and beyond, Walkman, Album (no idea), Movies (not one to be found although Anwar Hussein the Bangladeshi tea boy at work says I need some other gadget for that), Google (not a website to be found), Sony Select (nobody has any idea what this is, not even Dudu the Bangladeshi cleaner), Play Store (ditto previous), camera which I have in fact worked out how to use and found to be crap, FM radio (nada), Facebook (can’t stand it) and youtube (good if it worked) plus many, many more. All I really need a dog for is to make calls, send texts and the alarm clock to get me out of bed at 6am on the dot, which remarkably it does.
“I didn’t phone you,” I said before she launched into a very friendly bout of chit chat enquiring as to who and where I was. When it transpired that she was only 90km down the road she got even friendlier. I was suspicious and deduced that she must be a North Korean spy under orders from Kim Jung On to hack every phone made by Sony who have made a rude and by all accounts none too funny film about him which has resulted in the possibility of nuclear warfare as Barrack Obama is none too happy about it and wants to leave a legacy.
Relating the call with the female spy to Taslim the tubby Bangladeshi taxi driver he assured me that it must be the work of a Nigerian doctor he once knew who procured women to service randy males in various apartments around town.
“So how did she get my number?”
“It’s a mystery, sir,” he replied.
“Do you reckon it’s got something to do with Kim Jung On?”
That baffled him and there was a long silence before he asked the standard question, “You want go Bahrain this weekend?”
Somehow I do still get texts from my bank and conclude there is a conspiracy going on.