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I replaced my mobile phone today; phone fetishists will want to know that I swapped a Motorola U9 for a Nokia 6600 Slide. Doing that, and the associated moving around of contacts and clearing stuff off the old phone, gives me an opportunity for a tribute to J.G. Ballard, in particular to the short stories Answers To A Questionnaire and The Index (both from the 1990 collection War Fever). In that spirit then I invite you to reconstruct the last 12 months of my life from the following fragmentary unsent text messages from the Drafts folder on the old phone:

• Bollocks. No boxed ones in run
• On
• Back down the
• I am
• Actually I'd left
• How's the convalescing going? Are you walking
• Yes - Currently in Bristol having a look round Cabot Circus
• Watching telly in bed -
• Did you try to phone me earlier?
• Can you check the joint aaa
• Fack! Still on the train. Not long now - will let you know
• In a pub near Marylebone

There's an almost Proustian, nay, almost Beckettian sense of loss and longing at work here. Or is it just some old bollocks? Perhaps it is, in a very real sense, both.