Carpe Samsung!

I HAD the sad duty of attending a funeral last month.

The ceremony itself was incredibly moving as the deceased was in his 30s and over 500 people attended. The only thing that marred the event was the ringing of mobile phones.

I can understand if your phone rings and you quickly turn it off. But the elderly lady who started to text (with keypad beeps) deserved all the abuse (whispered abuse it must be said, but still rather audible all the same) she received.

Far worse was the numbskull who once took a call as we stood by the coffin at another funeral. It was a wonder that he wasn’t lynched.

A good friend of mine used to have the perfect solution to this sort of behaviour during lunch. He regarded his City lunches as sacred and woe betide if you answered a call when you were with him. With a cry of ‘Carpe Samsung’, the offending mobile would be hurled into the nearest ice bucket!

But it does highlight how much we love our mobiles down here. If you have any of the social apps then your mobile becomes your personal paparazzi for any occasion.

You Instagram the food that you are about to eat, though I have always thought that’s a strange one. In the 70s and 80s we didn’t suddenly whip out our Polaroid cameras if we were served a particularly spectacular Spag Bol at our local bistro. You would have been thought extremely strange.

On any night out now, however, there will always be one of the party Tweeting, Instagraming or putting a selfie on Facebook. They’ll normally be doing this seated in a swish Puerto Banus nightclub, surrounded by beautiful blondes and a huge bottle of bubbly on the table. ‘Ah yes. But are they really enjoying themselves?’ I frequently mutter to myself on a Friday night as I sit on my own with the cats, enjoying another Cup-A-Soup dinner by the wireless…

Another friend has the perfect way to ensure that dinner conversation isn’t interrupted by someone fiddling needlessly with their phone. Everyone has to put their mobiles in the middle of the table and the first person to crack and reach for their phone pays for the meal!

Showing some soul

I had the pleasure of helping out at the recent Talk Radio Europe Telethon in aid of CUDECA this month. It’s normally quite a frantic atmosphere at the best of times (my shows have often been described as ‘The Perfect Storm of Chaos Theory and Crisis Management’) and with the phones ringing off the hook from the word go, and an army of helpers behind the scenes, it really was quite something. As I write this, however, the total raised stood at over €14,000 and counting. Which just goes to show that behind the glitz and glitter that people often associate with the Costa del Sol, there is also a real heart and soul. Congratulations to everyone who was involved.