Phone

I didn't bring my usual phone with me to Vietnam; instead I have my old Nokia. First night I was here, in a fit of boredom, I went through all the old text messages on the phone. It's a little time capsule, my social life preserved in minute detail.

Most of the messages were from around a year ago, Easter least year, when I was having an awful time in Melbourne and then ended up meeting A. Who, strangely enough, I got a text from today.

It's like that fun thing at work when they give you a phone that used to belong to someone else and the first thing you do - or should do - is to go through it and scour all the text messages saved on the phone for incriminating detail. I learned to text this way - when I started a new job in Singapore in 2001 I was given a phone that had belonged to someone else, and it turned out that despite being married he had carried on a fairly hectic social life, most of which was organised via text messages. As the new holder of the phone I ended up getting the messages (but not his social life). I learned how to text people back.

A year or so later I met him when I was on a business trip to London. I told him I'd inherited his phone and that I'd received lots of interesting messages. He went pale.