Materialising from the ether, gradually taking on corporality first in the subconscious and now in the blundering consciousness, the smartphone is looming. I do not have a smartphone. I have tried to avoid its claims. I have been irritated by all generations who respond to its clamour with dreary predictability; the adolescent traipsing through town with her eyes on the screen and ears under headphones in a state of voluntary sensorary deprivation; the grown-up who will blurt out a piece of useless, dumb information at any moment (the maximum speed of a mature hummingbird; the longest giraffe neck ever recorded) as if he has found the answer to all life’s problems. And yet now I see it is becoming inevitable. Train and plane tickets will soon be only available on elctronic device (there are no men with caps behind counters anymore); people send me e-mails and I am expected to see them immediately; they try sending me photos to my decidedly unsmart phone (I don’t know where they end up? Parked in clouds? Stuck on an everlasting ring road?). It’s happening. History, my history, is revving up for a shift in its motions. I bow to inevitability. The smartphone looms.

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