Black Things With Buttons.

I find the domestic environment too full of little black rectangular things with buttons these days. I have only three in my living room, but that’s more than enough. One operates the TV, one the set top box, and one the video recorder. I use the right one most of the time, but when I get it wrong I end up with speckly black TV screens and menacing little messages that say SIGNAL OVERLOAD HAS OCCURRED. I feel terribly chastened and spend anxious seconds waiting for the set to expire or do something terrible by way of retribution. Occasionally I take the cordless phone into the living room, and have been known to point it at the TV and suffer momentary confusion when there’s no response to my button pushing. Seriously!

If anybody were ever to give me a BlackBerry phone as a gift, I think I would just go and live in Bhutan.