AN OLD FRIEND: The old-fashioned flip-top mobile phone ... ready for the sock drawer.
My trusty old flip-top mobile phone has passed away.
It had been my companion for many years, never failing to answer the call, receiving all messages with dignity and style.
It has travelled far - the length of the country while working on a national health project (I have the dubious distinction of managing to get lost in hospitals all over New Zealand) and to Australia, where the Sydney Children's Hospital Network provided new opportunities to get lost.
My phone has been with me on tour doing gigs in Europe.
It became confused by frequent crossing of the border between Germany and Switzerland but did its duty, reminding me I was in a new country and would be charged exorbitant sums if I actually used the phone to call anyone.
Over the years my phone has faithfully brought me messages of deaths, births, marriages, friendships and work but, over the past few weeks, it has faltered.
It has not been able to communicate with its usual flair.
It started making strange and unnerving noises that hinted all was not well ... sometimes this was a distressed tone, other times a muted beeping sound.
Messages remained closed, calls missed, mislaid and lost - sometimes it even refused to turn on.
It was clear that the phone was losing the will to live, along with its capacity to hold its charge.
It did get a new battery while in Sydney but this was more about connecting it to life support than rehabilitation.
I was determined to keep using it - it was small and fit in my pocket; the screen was a good size and the numbers easy to read; and it held all my long list of contacts, notes of things worth noting, and even voice recordings of song ideas of the kind that suddenly leap out when you least expected them to.
Whenever I got the phone out in company there would be a chorus of "What a cute old phone".
This would make me rise to the defence of the humble device and protest that I was hanging on to it because - like vinyl records, cowboy boots and mandolins - my old phone would become fashionable again.
In fact, I was at the front of a trend not lagging behind - though this was greeted with looks that combined eye-rolling with pity and sorrow.
Now I have reluctantly retired my old phone to a comfortable soft spot in the sock drawer and bravely bought a shiny new one.
It does far too many things but cannot make coffee - though I am sure the boffins are working on an app for that.
As I made the switch from old to new phone, I pondered the way we anthropomorphosise them.
We credit phones with human traits and blame them for all manner of behaviours and failures.
We ask our phones to remember the numbers of our friends, family and colleagues, and trust that it will keep them for us, then blame the device when we forget.
We spend more time with our phone than with people we know, and become bereft when we cannot find it.
To lose a phone is to lose a constant companion.
Remember when a phone could be "engaged"? And I recall having a "party line" as a child growing up in rural Taranaki - our number rang as "long-short-long" from the black dial phone in the hall to signal the call was for us, and not for the one of the other five households on our road.
Ironically, mobile reception at the farmhouse these days is virtually non-existent, unless you walk to the top of the hill or go down the hall to use the landline.
-Terry Sarten is a Whanganui-based writer, musician and social worker - feedback: tgs@inspire.net.nz