My bed is wet. I thought it would be dry by now, but as I sit here typing I can feel my toes getting damp. It’s my own fault for being a wimp. Last night was the first really cold night of the year and I succumbed to the temptation of a hot water bottle, zipped up in a fluffy cover.

I filled it from the kettle, slipped it under the duvet and settled down to sleep. An hour later, some time around one, I woke up and slid my feet under the bottle to warm them up. Less than a picosecond later I whipped them back out again, my toes scalded on the water pouring out from a wide cat-claw hole in the side of the bottle. Stupidly I’d not checked to see that Oscar’s needless kneeding of the bottle’s furry cover last Christmas hadn’t done any serious damage, and I’d not used the thing since.

I retreated to the cold, uninviting settee in the lounge and eventually drifted off, but it was the start of a day of disasters.

Lunching with Sarah in a place that’s done pasta since 1955, when such things were considered impossibly exotic - even in London - I showed her how bluejacking works.

‘Look at this,’ I said. ‘It’s really cool.’

And I demonstrated by sending a message to her screen.

‘Best of all,’ I said, ‘you can send them to people whose numbers you don’t even know.’

I sent one, picking a phone at random. The middle-aged man on the table beside us turned to look towards the door, and his eyes fell on the phone in my hand. A second later, the Nokia in his pocket beeped and he reached in to pick it out.

‘I love your hair,’ said the words on his screen, and he looked back once more at the phone in my hand…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2003 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.